Eritrean Medhanie Yehdego Mered caught in Sudan, but experts say arrest is unlikely to have huge impact in stopping smuggling

An Eritrean smuggler who claimed to have played a role in sending at least 13,000 people to Europe has been arrested after a year-long hunt, in what has been presented as the most significant breakthrough yet in Europe’s fight against Africa-based people-smugglers.

Medhanie Yehdego Mered, 35, was extradited to Italy at midnight on Wednesday after being arrested in Khartoum by Sudanese officials – a year after first being named by Italian prosecutors as a key player in a north African smuggling ring.

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People-smuggling between Sudan, Libya and Italy involves a complex web of many co-dependent actors, ranging from Libyan militias, corrupt government officials, and pliant sailors – to Eritrean middlemen. However on Wednesday, European investigators claimed Mered was one of the key players along a route that sends migrants from Khartoum, through the Sahara to the Libyan coast, and then onwards to southern Italy.

One of the Italian prosecutors investigating Mered, Francesco Lo Voi, said Italy had seized “the boss of one of the most important criminal groups operating in central Africa and Libya”.

Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which was involved in the investigation, hailed the capture of “one of the world’s most wanted people-smugglers”.

In a separate development on Wednesday, a UN inquiry accused the Eritrean government of crimes against humanity, and of enslaving up to 400,000 of its citizens. The claims are denied by the Eritrean information ministry, but help explain why so many Eritreans have been driven into the hands of smugglers like Mered.

More than 320,000 people reached Italy from Libya in 2014 and 2015, including about 70,000 Eritreans. By his account, Mered had a hand in roughly 4% of this market.

“He admitted to smuggling 13,000 people,” said Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean broadcast journalist and activist, who interviewed Mered by telephone as part of her research into the treatment of Eritrean refugees in north Africa. “I have never seen any [Eritrean smuggler] become as big as him so quickly.”

In his interview with Estefanos, Mered suggested that he did not have a practical role in the transportation of migrants across the Mediterranean. Instead he said he acted more as a middleman, working under the protection of Libyan and Sudanese officials and smugglers, to whom he supplied a constant flow of passengers. They then organised the logistics of moving people across seas and deserts, in exchange for a large cut of his profits.

“The [Eritrean] smugglers are fixers,” said Estefanos. “Medhanie told me he’s never set foot on the shore.”

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Guardian interviews with Eritrean refugees suggest that Sudanese drivers carry Eritreans to the Libyan border, where they are crammed into trucks driven by Libyan smugglers, and taken on a hellish journey to north-eastern Libya. Many die of thirst on route, or sometimes abandoned in the desert to die, in a trek that is often described as worse than even the sea crossing.

Once in north-east Libya, refugees are often held for ransom, and frequently tortured – until relatives send money via the smugglers’ accomplices in Europe, the Gulf and north America. Once a ransom is paid, refugees are judged to have settled their debts for the desert journey, and driven westwards to towns near Tripoli – where they are often ransomed again as advance payment for the Mediterranean journey.

Italian wiretaps suggest that Mered played a role in the procurement of ransom payments from the Eritrean diaspora. They also record him explaining how he bribes Libyan policemen to release migrants held within detention centres – migrants he would then hold for ransom until their relatives paid him back for their release.

All this made him “one of the four most important human smugglers in Africa and Libya,” said prosecutor Calogero Ferrara.

But despite Mered’s allegedly prominent role, Libyan smugglers previously interviewed by the Guardian have been dismissive about the wider importance of sub-Saharan smugglers within their networks, and questioned how much impact foreigners would have in a country where migrants are treated as second-class citizens.

“The Africans collect people for us, and they get their commission,” said Ahmed, a Libyan smuggler interviewed in 2015. “But it’s much less than the Libyans. Whatever you give them, they will do it.”

Tuesday Reitano, a smuggling expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, doubted that Mered was as essential a player as he has been presented, but said his arrest was significant nonetheless.

“It is unlikely he played such a strategic role in a Libyan network, and I always thought his role may have been overblown by Italian law enforcement keen to be seen to have an impact,” said Reitano. “However, symbolic arrests can be a good deterrent, and in some ways this is an effective strategy that shows that smuggling is no longer an impunity crime.”

Mered appeared to have become more vulnerable in Libya over the past year, after the posting of his picture on the internet by Italian prosecutors made him a target for Libyan kidnappers, Estefanos said.

The Italians believe he next hoped to reach Dubai, where some of his money was sent. But he told Estefanos he hoped to reach Sweden, where his wife lived. Once he realised he might be arrested in Europe, he went to Sudan instead, where he was captured. Different reports suggest he had a mistress in either Holland or Sweden.

Mered appeared to think he was invincible. “He wanted to be like [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi,” said Renato Cortese, a senior Italian policeman. “He said he was never going to be arrested.”

But he was finally caught on 24 May at a friend’s house in Khartoum – and it was his carelessness on the phone that may have contributed to his downfall. “What’s so stupid about him is that he knew his phone was being tapped, but he never cared,” said Estefanos. “He always used the same number.”

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Wednesday’s report but the UN concluded that Eritrea’s government was committing crimes against humanity “in a widespread and systematic manner”, including murder, rape, torture, slavery, and disappearances.

Mike Smith, chairman of the inquiry, said: “Eritrea is an authoritarian state. There is no independent judiciary, no national assembly and there are no other democratic institutions in Eritrea. This has created a governance and rule of law vacuum, resulting in a climate of impunity for crimes against humanity to be perpetrated over a quarter of a century. These crimes are still occurring today.”

In a dig at bland reports by western diplomats and visiting correspondents, the report says: “The facade of calm and normality that is apparent to the occasional visitor to the country, and others confined to sections of the capital, belies the consistent patterns of serious human rights violations.”

In response, a spokesman for the Eritrean government, Yemane Gebreab, said the inquiry’s conclusions were “null and void”.



