When the Italian police officers lit in the Holiday Inn in Turin in northern Italy and arrested a guest – the director of several Libyan prison known for inhumane conditions – they acted at the behest of the International Criminal Court.

The order against Osama Elmasry Njemo states that he is suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence.

But two days after his arrest last Sunday, the Italian police released Mr. Njeem and escorted him back to Libya with a government aircraft. Soon, pictures showed in Libyan media that shows cheerfully out of the plane with an Italian flag.

His release was angry with the International Criminal Court and upset the human rights groups and the Italian political opposition, which accused the Prime Minister Giorgie Meloni’s government of licking the Libyan authorities because he relies on Libya to keep migrants away from the Italian coasts.

“You sent this man back for political reasons,” said Peppe de Cristoforo, an opposition MP, an Italian Minister of the Interior in Parliament on Thursday. “Unfortunately, the Libyan authorities are the co -workers of the Italian government.”

The government of Ms. Meloni rejected these accusations and attributed the reasons to release. The Italian police, the authorities said, arrested Mr. Njema before receiving an official request for it from the Ministry of Justice, breaking the procedure and annulled the arrest.

While the Minister of Justice completed an assessment of the ICC order, Mr. Njeem was already on the way home, government officials said.

The Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Pianatedosi, said that Mr. Njem was expelled “for security reasons” because he was considered “dangerous”.

Asked if the liberation was related to the Italian “subordination” to Libya over the Migrant Agreement, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told Italian journalists that “there is no subordination to anyone.”

These explanations were not convincing for the Government critics.

“Am I the only one who thinks you have been completely crazy?” Asked Senator Senator Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister. “He was in prison and you got home.”

Since 2017, Italy has been a bilateral agreement with Libya, which includes millions of euros in financial support to suppress the flow of migrants from Africa who are trying to cross the Mediterranean and reach European coasts.

Mrs. Meloni The side has leaning the job with a decrease in the number of launches of dispersed ships from Libya and Tunisia. Last year, the Prime Minister traveled several times to the Libyan capital of Tripoli and called a relationship with Libya “priority for Italy”.

Human rights groups say that success has been achieved at the cost of serious violations of human rights. They say that the North African countries left migrants in Sahara without food and water or kept them in Libyan prisons, where they faced torture, sexual violence and starvation.

As the director of Mitig Prison in Tripoli, among others, Mr. Njeem, head of the Libyan Judicial Police, is charged with committing, ordering or helping crimes against people closed in the system of February 2015, according to ICC

A statement of the court states that some of his victims were closed for religious reasons, on suspicion of “immoral behavior” or homosexuality, or for the purpose of coercion.

“It was the first major arrest of someone at the top of the Libyan prison system since 2011,” said Nello Scav, a journalist of Avvenire, a newspaper newspaper. G. Scav has been documented for years of abuse in Libyan prisons.

Riccardo Noury, a spokesman for Amnesty International Italy, said his agency documented cases of torture, rape, forced labor and other crimes in prisons supervised by Mr. Njeem.

“He had direct supervision and management of some of these centers,” said Mr Noury, adding that the charges against Mr. Njeema were substantiated by reports of other agencies and institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United States (where the UA was identified human rights report as a USAma in the way).

Chantal Meloni, an Italian criminal lawyer and a professor who also works for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights based in Berlin, said that the liberation of Mr. Njemem is a direct insult to the International Criminal Court, and that she is particularly worrying “because Italy is the founder of a member.”

However, many questions remained about why the Italian authorities did not quickly act to solve any bureaucratic mistake and instead hurried a man sought for for war crimes from Italy.

Mr. Pianatedos, speaking on behalf of the Italian government, said that the decision to release Mr. Njem was made in court. He added that the Government would offer more details next week.

Islam al-Atrash contributed to reporting from Tripoli.