Italy's interior minister is under pressure from opposition parliamentarians to explain the deportation to Kazakhstan last week of the wife and daughter of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a prominent dissident and former banker who is in hiding.
The deportation from Rome of Alma Shalabayeva and her six-year-old daughter, who were handed over to Kazakh diplomats waiting on a private aircraft at Ciampino airport, has also triggered an internal government inquiry in Italy.
Officials in Rome confirmed that neither the prime minister, justice minister nor foreign minister were informed until after the event.
According to the family and their Italian representatives, 50 agents of the Digos police intelligence wing raided a house in Rome last week, searching for Mr Ablyazov, who has been a fugitive from his homeland since 2009, when the Kazakh government took over his BTA Bank and accused him of involvement in an alleged multibillion-dollar fraud case.
BTA has since won a judgment from the English High Court to recover a total of $4bn of assets allegedly misappropriated by Mr Ablyazov. None of the assets has yet been recovered and Mr Ablyazov denies wrongdoing.
Mr Ablyazov, a fierce critic of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, was not found in the raid, and police instead detained Ms Shalabayeva who was accused of being in Italy illegally – a charge denied by her lawyers.
Mr Ablyazov was given political asylum in the UK in 2011, where he was offered protection by London's Metropolitan Police after an attempt on his life. He disappeared last year after failing to turn up at a London court hearing into the BTA case. A High Court judge sentenced him to 22 months in jail for contempt of court, for attempting to hide assets and obstruct the investigation. Kazakh media said he had fled to France.
"Italy's arrest and deportation of Shalabayeva with the couple's daughter has in effect provided two hostages to a repressive dictatorship with a shameful and widely documented record of human rights abuses," an Italian lawyer and spokesman representing the family said in a statement.
Members of Left, Ecology, Freedom – a leftwing opposition party – filed an urgent question in the Italian parliament on Thursday, calling on Angelino Alfano, Italy's interior minister, to explain the deportations and to give assurances of the pair's safety in view of Kazakhstan's "disgraceful" human rights record.
Mr Alfano has not commented in public on the affair. Diplomats have noted that Mr Alfano is the heir apparent to Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the centre-right People of Liberty party who, during his time as prime minister, fostered close relations with Mr Nazarbayev to promote Italy's business interests in Kazakhstan.
A spokesman for Italy's justice ministry said correct procedures were followed in deporting Ms Shalabayeva on May 31, because she was residing illegally in Italy and possessed a fake passport from the Central African Republic. Her lawyers have denied this.
The lawyers said: "When Shalabayeva was in detention, her lawyers could not find her, and she was not provided with an interpreter to understand what she was being accused of. Her lawyers were given no chance to stop or even delay the deportation of two people who posed no risk to public safety in Italy."
Mr Ablyazov issued a statement on Saturday from an unknown location accusing President Nazarbayev of ordering the "kidnapping" of his family. "He has now switched from political repression to outright tactics of taking hostages," he said.
Ms Shalabayeva, on arrival in Kazakhstan, was notified that she was under criminal investigation as of May 30, the day after her arrest in Italy, her Italian lawyer said.
Reuters news agency quoted the Kazakh prosecutor-general's office as saying Ms Shalabayeva was under investigation for complicity in the alleged bribing of immigration officials to issue national passports to Mr Ablyazov's relatives. She had given a written undertaking not to leave the city of Almaty and the investigation would "ensure rigorous respect for her rights and freedoms guaranteed by the constitution".
Additional reporting by Isabel Gorst in Moscow
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