Annals of Crime – Desert Captives

An Eritrean started a trafficking business. Then he began kidnapping his clients for ransom.

- By Ed Caesar

A trafficker known as Kidane herded migrants into a walled compound in the Sahara. Some were held for years.

Daniel Yalke was twenty when he left Ethiopia and set off for Europe. One of six siblings from a poor family in Cherkos, a tough neighborhood in Addis Ababa, he had recently graduated from a technical college, where he’d trained to be an electrician. Some of his friends from Cherkos had paid smugglers to reach Europe. These friends now sent Yalke boastful texts about their better lives in Italy, France, and England. Yalke, a handsome youth with a wide smile, didn’t see much of a future for himself in Addis Ababa. It was difficult to make money as an electrician in the city, and the work was dangerous: a friend from school had been fatally electrocuted.

In the summer of 2017, Yalke and his best friend from Cherkos, Israel Endale, phoned a broker they knew only as Binyam, who had grown up in their neighborhood. Binyam, who lived in Khartoum, in Sudan, said that he could arrange for their journey to Europe. Starting from Sudan, they’d cross the Sahara, pass through the war-ravaged state of Libya, and then head for Italy on a boat. People often refer to this path as the Central Mediterranean Route.