Prosecutors will question an alleged top migrant trafficker, Mered Medhanie, in Rome on Friday amid reports that the wrong man may have been extradited from Sudan to Italy earlier this week.
The interrogation was due to start at 9.30 am on Friday at Rome's Rebbia jail, where the Eritrean national has been held since his arrival in the Italian capital overnight on Wednesday.
Prosecutors allege 35-year-old Mered is at the heart of a multi-million dollar gang trafficking thousands of migrants from Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean, hundreds of whom have died on the journey.
The prosecutors said on Thursday they were verifying British media reports that they had got the wrong man in a major international operation by Italian and British anti-crime agencies that led to the arrest and extradition of a person presented as migrant smuggling 'kingpin'.
"We are carrying out the appropriate checks... but whatever emerges, this is a strange matter," Palermo Chief Prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi told Adnkronos.
The suspect was arrested in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in late May on charges of human trafficking and abetting illegal immigration and faces up to 30 years in prison if found guilty.
Italy has jurisdiction in the case because it was the first point of arrival in Europe for most of the migrants.
Prosecutors in Palermo are also spearheading an investigation into a migrant ship that caught fire and capsized off the southern island of Lampedusa in 2013, killing 359 people, a tragedy for which they hold Mered responsible.
After his extradition, Italian and British authorities described Mered as a ruthless criminal known as the 'General' because he modelled himself on late Libyan dictator Moamer Gaddafi.
But the BBC and Britain's Guardian newspaper on Thursday quoted alleged friends and family of the suspect as saying his real name was Medhanie Tesfarmariam Berhe and that he was a "completely innocent" 27-year-old Eritrean refugee who had moved to Khartoum last year.
UK's National Crime Agency, which helped to track and arrest the suspect said it was "too soon to speculate" about the mistaken identity claims but added it was "confident in its intelligence-gathering process".
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