Italian navy rescues 233 migrant south of Sicily

The Italian navy has rescued 233 mostly African migrants from a boat in Mediterranean waters south of Sicily as the immigration crisis that killed hundreds in shipwrecks in 2013 showed no signs of letting up in the new year.

In a statement the navy said that it picked them up in choppy seas late on Wednesday and was ferrying them on Thursday to a port near Syracuse on Sicily’s eastern coast.

It said that migrants on board were men and women from Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Zambia and Mali as well as from Pakistan.

It noted that sea arrivals to Italy from Northern Africa were more than tripled in 2013, fuelled by refugees from Syria’s civil war and political strife in the Horn of Africa.

In October, 366 Eritreans drowned in a shipwreck near the shore of the Italian island of Lampedusa.