A ship packed with some 1,000 illegal immigrants was heading to Sicily on March 18 after police calmed those on board who had threatened to throw children overboard if they could not continue the voyage.
The Italian Navy intercepted the merchant vessel Monica in the eastern Mediterranean during the night. Officials said police had called a helicopter to take a pregnant woman to hospital but she had given birth to a baby girl on the ship.
The 80-metre ship was being towed to the port of Catania in eastern Sicily.
"Our men who climbed aboard have spoken of seeing some 1,000 Kurds, including women and children," said Mario D'Alonzo, a police commander in the east Sicilian port city of Catania.
If the number is confirmed, it would be one of the biggest arrivals in Italy in recent months. The migrants had been at sea for about a week, an official said.
Lieutenant Riccardo Chieco, spokesman for the Italian Finance Police in Rome, said that when the immigrants saw the Italian police vessel they threatened to throw children into the sea, apparently fearing they would be arrested.
"At one point the immigrants took children out of the hold and threatened to throw them overboard if anyone tried to stop them," he said.
"But the police convinced them not to do something so drastic and were later allowed to board the ship," he said.
The Italian navy began towing the ship, which was believed to have set sail from Lebanon, at a point about 110 kilometres from the Sicilian coast.
A Lebanese transport ministry official denied the ship had sailed from any port in Lebanon.
Italian authorities said the ship had first been intercepted by the French Navy on Friday but that the French did not board.
This conflicted with a statement by France that sailors from a French frigate had boarded the ship on Friday.
Italy's long coastline makes it one of the European Union's most enticing arrival points for streams of migrants, most of them from Albania, Turkey, North Africa and Asia.
Thousands arrive every year on rusting ships that often run aground or on high-powered speedboats that race across the Adriatic Sea from Albania.
(China Daily March 19, 2002)
