Italian prosecutors have called two high-level Sudanese police to testify against an alleged people trafficking kingpin who insists he is a victim of mistaken identity, his lawyer told AFP on Tuesday.
Eritrean national Medhanie Yehdego Mered is accused of being "the General" of one of the largest migrant trafficking networks, with branches in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in several European countries.
A man police claimed was Mered, 35, was arrested in Sudan in 2016 on charges of heading a people-smuggling network.
He was extradited to Sicily, where he has languished in jail ever since -- despite persistent claims police have got the wrong man.
Relatives identified him as a refugee, Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, then a 29-year-old carpenter. But their claims have fallen on deaf ears with officials.
The man's lawyer, Michele Calantropo, said he had "no idea" what to expect from the Sudanese policemen -- who allegedly played a part in tracking his client down and arresting him.
"But I think that even if they do not claim he is Mered, they will say he is a bad man who deserves to be in prison," so that Italy can save face, he said.
Italy, Sudan and Britain hailed Mered's arrest as the stellar result of a joint operation which had dealt a significant blow to the people smuggling business.
Calantropo told Britain's Guardian daily the decision to hear from two members of Sudan's secret police -- who answer to President Omar al-Bashir -- raised a "grave ethical question".
Bashir was indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court in 2009 on war crimes charges over the long-running conflict in Darfur. In 2010, he was also indicted by the ICC for genocide.
Mered ended up on an international wanted list after being identified as the man who organised the packing of migrants onto a boat that sank off Italy#s Lampedusa island in 2013, killing at least 360 people in one of the worst such disasters in the Mediterranean.
Calantropo says the only thing his client shares with the trafficker is his first name: Medhanie.
This was the name flagged by Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) in 2016 when it heard someone going by that name calling the tapped phone of a suspected smuggler in Libya.
The man who made the calls was tracked down and arrested in Khartoum. But while prosecutors say the calls were made to organise migrant trips, Calantropo says his client was just looking out for loved ones heading to Europe.
Prosecutors said two Eritrean translators had testified to police that the arrested man's voice matched a 2014 recording of "the General" captured by wiretap, though standard voice recognition software failed to produce a result.
