Hundreds of Africans reach Italy in boats

Boatloads of illegal African migrants have resumed setting sail from Libya for Italy, authorities said, overwhelming tiny islands and towns in southern Italy already struggling to host thousands fleeing unrest in Tunisia.

Before dawn Sunday, Italian coast guard vessels escorted a boat crowded with 284 Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians to shore, the first boat to resume the long-established routes of smugglers' boats toward Italy from Libya's long coastline.

Those aboard included an Ethiopian woman who had given birth only a few hours earlier. She and the baby were flown by helicopter to a hospital on the island of Lampedusa, where doctors said mother and child were fine. Doctors said another woman on the boat, whose passengers included several babies or toddlers, suffered a miscarriage.

Since Lampedusa, a tiny island off Sicily, is already straining from sheltering the thousands of Tunisians, who have taken to sleeping on docks and fields after housing space ran out, the boat from Libya was diverted to Linosa, an even tinier island in the Pelagie archipelago south of Sicily.

Authorities said at least two other boats coming from Libya with hundreds of migrants aboard were spotted by fishing boats or coast guard air and sea patrolling the southern Mediterranean Sunday.

The nightly voyages of clandestine migrants had slackened off in the past year or so, after Rome signed a treaty with Tripoli providing generous aid to Libya in exchange for a crackdown on the smugglers. The smugglers' runs dropped off even further with the outbreak of fighting between forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime and insurgents and the subsequent U.S. and European nighttime air assaults on Libyan military targets. But they now appear to be restarting.