Quick Facts
Biography
Tewelde Goitom, or Walid or Welid, is an Eritrean human trafficker and smuggler.
Between 2014 and 2018, he was "at the heart of a particularly brutal and lucrative trade in desperate migrants trying to reach Europe" and boasted that he moved "15,000 people across the sea to Europe in 2015 alone".
He was arrested in March 2020, tried and in 2021 found guilty in Ethiopia. Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean journalist predicted, that he would be able to bribe his guards and escape like ringleader Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, who had escaped detention in mid-February 2021.
In 2022, Ethiopia extradited him to the Netherlands and on January 10, 2023,he appeared at a pretrial hearing in the Dutch town of Zwolle, which made international headlines. He claimed he was a victim of mistaken identity. The prosecution wanted to join his case with that of Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, who had been arrested again January 1, 2023 in Sudan.