A BABY born at sea on Christmas Day after his Nigerian mother was plucked from a floundering migrant boat by the Italian navy has been baptized Testimony Salvatore in honor of the medics who delivered him.

    The two-day-old infant, who weighed in at 2.7 kg, and his 28-year-old mother were both recovering in hospital over the weekend after what was a smooth delivery in testing circumstances, according to the gynecologist who oversaw it.

    The cheering Christmas tale came as it was confirmed that Italian authorities have identified a 32-year-old Egyptian man as a lynchpin in the large-scale people smuggling that has been instrumental in sending asylum seekers and economic migrants across the Mediterranean in unprecedented numbers this year.

    Described as a trafficking “superboss” and named as Ahmed Mohamed Farrag Hanafi, the alleged trafficking overlord is now being pursued by the Egyptian authorities at Italy’s request, prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Catania confirmed.

    The suspect is thought to be based in the Kafr el-Sheikh Governorate in northern Egypt and had been identified as a result of intercepted mobile phone calls to traffickers working for him on boats leaving Libya.

    Little Testimony entered the world at 20 minutes before midnight Dec. 25, aboard the Italian navy vessel Etna as it headed to the Sicilian port of Messina with hundreds of migrants on board following rescue operations off Libya.

    He is the third baby to be delivered by the navy in just over three months.

    The mother, whose first name is Kate according to Italian media, told reporters the family had left Nigeria two months ago and that she and her youngest child had boarded a boat in Libya on Dec. 23, having left her husband and two older sons, aged 6 and 10, in neighboring Algeria.

    Italian naval vessels picked up a total of 2,300 people from troubled boats over the Christmas period, lifting to more than 170,000 the number of migrants from north Africa registered as having landed on Italian soil this year.

    More than 80 percent of them leave from Libya, where traffickers are able to operate with impunity because of the chaos engulfing a country that has disintegrated into warring fiefdoms. (SD-Agencies)