I was wrongly arrested when AI facial recognition system identified me as a thief - but this is what the REAL criminal actually looks like

Published: 01:01, 30 April 2026 | Updated: 01:11, 30 April 2026 An innocent man arrested after an AI facial recognition system wrongly matched him with a burglar has discovered the identity of the real thief - and they look nothing like each other. Alvi Choudhury, 26, was working from home in Southampton at the house he shares with his parents on January 7 when officers arrested him and held him in custody for 10 hours. Thames Valley Police's (TVP's) automated system had paired his mugshot - taken after he was falsely arrested five years ago - to a clip of a thief who stole £3,000 and some jewellery from Milton Keynes Buddhist Vihara a month earlier. He was finally freed with no further action at 2am after cops realised he was not only the wrong man - but looked completely different to the criminal in the CCTV. The actual thief - a man named Eduard Zlatineanu - has since been sentenced to 21 months in jail after pleading guilty to one count of burglary dwelling at Aylesbury Crown Court on January 12 - just five days after Mr Choudhury was wrongly taken in. But the criminal had been arrested on December 8 - the day of the theft - raising questions over why the innocent man was taken to custody more than four weeks later. And it is hard to imagine how the pair could be mistaken for each other, with Mr Choudhury possessing a head of curly hair and Zlatineanu, 23, a shorter black style. The wrongly arrested man has a slightly thicker beard but a substantially thinner moustache than the thief, and also has larger eyebrows. Alvi Choudhury, pictured left, was arrested after an AI facial recognition system wrongly matched him with burglar Eduard Zlatineanu They are also based more than 140 miles apart with Zlatineanu living in Birmingham at the time of the burglary and Mr Choudhury on the south coast.  The theft saw Zlatineanu and a second offender - who remains unidentified - swipe a heap of cash which had been donated to support victims of recent floods in Sri Lanka at around 4pm. Reacting to the photo of his alleged lookalike, Mr Choudhury told the Daily Mail: 'Everyone has said the same thing to me about the suspect [that they don't look alike]. I still don't know how they confused us.' He said he had been compared with the photographs of three different suspects while in custody - none of whom bore a resemblance.  This included one person who was 'about 18 or 19 and had no facial hair'. After being arrested at 4pm by Hampshire Constabulary officers - carrying out the arrest on behalf of TVP - the software engineer was finally interviewed at around midnight. But it took just 10 minutes for questioning to conclude, with detectives satisfied he was not in fact the person captured on the CCTV clip. 'When I was released, police were laughing because they saw the footage and it was clearly two different people,' Mr Choudhury said. 'The TVP officer admitted to me that before she even interviewed me, she knew I wasn't the suspect because she had seen my custody photos and she had seen the footage of the suspect and she knew straight away.'  The innocent man has been suing police and says he wants both cash and an apology to make up for the miserable ordeal. He previously said he blames the software - which returns false matches 4 per cent of the time among Asian faces - as well as the detectives analysing the clips. Mr Choudhury said: 'No tech company would ever put a system into production with a failure rate of one in 25. That's horrific. It is filled with bugs. 'They said they had officers visually review it. That is even more concerning because that is probably racial discrimination. 'You've probably just seen two brown people, even though they have completely different features and said, "yeah, they look close enough. Let's arrest them."' TVP confirmed Mr Choudhury's arrest was 'based on the investigating officers' own visual assessment' following the initial automated match. 'They saw I was a match, so they could have done some research, some background information on me and not just look at the two pictures and come and arrest me,' Mr Choudhury added. 'If they did any actual detective work, they would have crossed me out straight away, even if their facial recognition system identified me as a suspect.' The facial recognition software is far from fool-proof and Home Office research revealed in December that matches for black faces are false positives 5.5 per cent of the time, far higher than the 0.04 per cent of white face matches which result in false positives. The systems are generally approved by individual police forces, but the Home Office has pushed for their implementation and procured the German algorithm used to trawl through around 19million mugshots on the national database. They run around 25,000 searches a month and, according to the National Police Chiefs' Council, the matches should be treated as intelligence and not fact. Mr Choudhury's mugshot was on the system after a previous false arrest in 2021 while he was a student in Portsmouth. On that occasion, he and his group of four women and four men were attacked by a gang of eight to 10 men while getting a takeaway following a night out. But instead it was a wounded Mr Choudhury and his group of friends who were questioned after 16 to 17 hours in custody and arrested once police became aware that another couple had been attacked on the same night. Should police be allowed to rely on AI facial recognition when it can ruin lives with false matches? What's your view? The burglar stole £3,000 and some jewellery from Milton Keynes Buddhist Vihara, pictured, a month before Choudhury's arrest When officers watched CCTV of both attacks, Mr Choudhury was finally cleared and police said his information and DNA would be removed from the system - but his face was still on the software when he was arrested in January. 'Now they have another photo of me, in theory, with this facial recognition system, they will match me double the amount of times,' he added. 'I could keep getting arrested.' Mr Choudhury called for the Government to take responsibility for the system's shortcomings and review its use. He said: 'They really need to look at this. Someone needs to be held accountable and there needs to be consequences, new laws and legislations implemented to protect members of the public. 'There needs to be legislation on how AI facial recognition systems are used. There needs to be an investigation into the police force and they need to have more professionalism in how they carry out their work.' Despite being cleared shortly after questioning, Mr Choudhury is worried the repercussions of his latest false arrest might bring him strife at work. The software engineer has Home Office and Met Police security clearance and his ordeal had to be declared. 'This just now looks very suspicious,' he said. Police and crime commissioners have warned of 'concerning in-built bias' and insisted that while 'there is no evidence of adverse impact in any individual case, that is more by luck than design'. A TVP spokesperson previously said: 'While we apologise for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, their arrest was based on the investigating officers' own visual assessment that the individual matched the suspect in CCTV footage following a retrospective facial recognition match, and was not influenced by racial profiling. 'To confirm, retrospective facial recognition technology did initially provide intelligence, but did not determine the arrest. 'Although later enquiries eliminated the individual from the investigation, this does not make the arrest unlawful. 'We continue to use policing tools responsibly while striving to improve and build trust in our communities.' Hampshire Constabulary previously declined to comment. The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. 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