Tip Leads Police Astray; Wrong Woman Is Seized : Law enforcement: Officers, acting on call from TV viewer, smash into North Hollywood apartment, handcuff Ethiopian immigrant. After realizing their error, they release her.

Acting on a tip from someone who had watched the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” Los Angeles police forced their way into a North Hollywood apartment, handcuffed a woman and later realized they had the wrong suspect, authorities said.

Officers, who said they were looking for a murder suspect named Sophia, forced their way into the apartment Monday night.

Investigators kicked open the door when Birtukan Alemu, 26, refused to open it even after officers identified themselves, Detective Andrew Monsue said.

Monsue said Alemu was handcuffed while officers searched the apartment in the 5100 block of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and her car. After about an hour, he said, they determined that she was not the woman they were looking for.

Monsue said he apologized and told her that the department would pay for damage to the door. Monsue said Alemu was the “spitting image” of the woman being sought, who like Alemu is from Ethiopia.

Jack Breslin, a spokesman for the Fox television program in Washington, said he was unaware of Monday’s incident in North Hollywood and did not know whom police were seeking.

But Breslin said that in February and August the program profiled a woman known as Sophie David, wanted by Los Angeles police in the July 10, 1991, fatal shooting of her estranged boyfriend, Fekade Ashine, in West Los Angeles.

David was described as a 26- to 36-year-old woman, weighing 130 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair, who usually wears dark glasses and speaks English with a British accent, Breslin said. David has worked as a hairdresser and a nurse, he said.

Breslin said that David was from a prominent Ethiopian family and that her late father was a general in the Ethiopian army.

Profiles broadcast on the show, Breslin said, have led to the arrests of 237 criminals and the discovery of six missing children. But about a dozen people also have been detained by authorities, including about three who have been arrested, as a result of mistaken identities stemming from false tips, he said.

“There have been frequent reports of this in the media, but if you look at the history of law enforcement, people have been detained for looking like somebody else,” Breslin said. “So it’s not necessarily the fault of ‘America’s Most Wanted’ or any other show.”

There have been news accounts of such mistaken arrests in Georgia, Arizona, New York and Los Angeles, where Robin John Delgado has filed suit against the Los Angeles Police Department, the FBI, and “America’s Most Wanted,” for assault and battery, false imprisonment and emotional distress as a result of his arrest in February.

Alemu said in an interview that she is suffering emotionally and has had trouble sleeping because of the experience.

“I am a woman. I am alone,” said Alemu, who has been in the United States for four years and moved into the apartment this month. “I was scared. I was really shaking.”

Alemu said that when she heard the police pounding on the door, she telephoned a friend in Studio City who advised her not to open it.