When Italian police officers swooped into a Holiday Inn in Turin in northern Italy and arrested a guest — the director of several Libyan prisons known for their inhumane conditions — they were acting on a warrant from the International Criminal Court.
The warrant against the man, Osama Elmasry Njeem, said he was suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence.
But two days after the arrest last Sunday, the Italian police released Mr. Njeem and escorted him back to Libya on a government plane. Pictures soon emerged on Libyan news media showing him cheerfully descending the aircraft bearing the Italian flag.
His release has enraged the International Criminal Court and has alarmed human rights groups and Italy’s political opposition, which accused the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of cozying up to the Libyan authorities because it relies on Libya to keep migrants away from Italian shores.
“You sent this man back for political reasons,” Peppe De Cristoforo, an opposition lawmaker, told Italy’s interior minister in Parliament on Thursday. “Unfortunately the Libyan authority is complicit with the Italian government.”
Ms. Meloni’s government has denied those accusations and attributed the release to procedural reasons. The Italian police, the authorities said, arrested Mr. Njeem before receiving an official request to do so from the justice ministry, violating the procedure and invalidating the arrest.
By the time the justice minister finished assessing the I.C.C.’s warrant, Mr. Njeem was already on his way home, government officials said.
Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, said Mr. Njeem had been expelled “for security reasons” because he was considered “dangerous.”
Asked whether the release was related to Italy’s “subordination” to Libya because of agreements on migrants, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told Italian reporters that “there is no subordination to anyone.”
Those explanations have not been persuasive to the government’s critics.
“Am I the only one who thinks you have gone completely crazy?” Senator Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister, asked in the Senate. “He was in jail and you brought him back home.”
Since 2017, Italy has had a bilateral agreement with Libya that includes millions of euros in financial support to curb the flow of migrants from Africa trying to cross the Mediterranean and reach European shores.
Ms. Meloni’s party has credited the deal with reducing the number of launches of rickety boats from Libya and Tunisia. The prime minister traveled to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, several times last year and has called the relationship with Libya “a priority for Italy.”
Human rights groups say that success has come at the cost of grave human rights violations. They say North African countries have abandoned migrants in the Sahara without food or water, or kept them in Libyan prisons, where they have faced torture, sexual violence and starvation.
As the director of the Mitiga prison in Tripoli, among others, Mr. Njeem, the head of the Libyan judiciary police, was accused of committing, ordering or assisting crimes against people imprisoned in the system since February 2015, according to the I.C.C.
A statement by the court said some of his victims had been imprisoned 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 Scavo, a reporter for Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. Mr. Scavo has been documenting cases of abuse in Libyan prisons for years.
Riccardo Noury, a spokesman for Amnesty International Italy, said his agency had documented cases of torture, rape, forced labor and other crimes in prisons overseen by Mr. Njeem.
“He had direct supervision and management of some of these centers,” Mr. Noury said, adding that the accusations against Mr. Njeem had been bolstered by reports by other agencies and institutions, including the United States Department of State (where he is identified in a report on human rights as Usama Najim).
Chantal Meloni, an Italian criminal lawyer and professor who also works for the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said Mr. Njeem’s release was a direct affront to the International Criminal Court, and was particularly troubling “because Italy is a founding member.”
Still, many questions remained about why the Italian authorities did not act swiftly to address any bureaucratic mistake and instead rushed a man who was wanted for war crimes out of Italy.
Mr. Piantedosi, speaking on behalf of the Italian government, said the decision to release Mr. Njeem was made with the courts. He added that the government would offer more details next week.
Islam Al-Atrash contributed reporting from Tripoli.
