Italy abandons ‘wrong man’ case

TIRANA, June 15 – The Italian media reported Tuesday that authorities abandoned a bid to extradite a father-of-three for murder after admitting they had “got the wrong man”.
Edmond Arapi was convicted by an Italian court in his absence in 2006 and sentenced to 16 years in jail for the murder of Castillo Marcello, who was stabbed to death in Genoa in October 2004.
Arapi went to the High Court in London on Tuesday to fight against extradition. The 29-year-old Albanian chef, who lives in Leek, Staffordshire, knew nothing about the trial and said he had an alibi.
Lawyers for the Italian government said they were withdrawing the extradition request after conceding that Mr Arapi was the victim of stolen identity.
Arapi, jubilant after the judge discharged the case and still wearing an electronic tag, said: “I have been ringing my family to tell them the news. I am so happy now but this has been a nightmare for me that words cannot describe. Tonight I shall be celebrating and then I shall get back to being a chef or something, but I want to move on in my life.”
If extradited, Edmond faced the “nightmare” of being forced to part from his wife, a newborn baby and his two young daughters, aged three and seven, to spend years in a foreign jail.
Arapi was arrested at Gatwick Airport on a European Arrest Warrant in June last year as he returned from a month-long holiday in Albania with his wife Georgina, whom he married in 2006. His extradition was ordered in March by a district judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.