Rome (dpa) - Italian and German authorities have arrested a suspected human trafficker from Eritrea who had been on the run for months, police in the Sicilian city of Palermo announced on Saturday.

The man, who had been on the run since April under an international arrest warrant, was arrested in Germany and deported to Italy by plane from Frankfurt.

The arrested man is accused of being the leading member of a gang of traffickers who organized illegal crossings of the Mediterranean for thousands of migrants in exchange for large sums of money.

He is believed to have been living in Germany since last spring and is thought to have applied for asylum in the northern German city of Goettingen.

The gang included traffickers from several African countries, among them Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Ghana, the police said.

The criminals are believed to be responsible for a serious accident that occurred off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa on October 3, 2013, when 366 people died when their boat caught fire and later capsized.

Most of the victims came from Eritrea and Somalia.