BERLIN – Just 24 hours after his family was rescued from an overcrowded rubber boat, a baby boy has been born aboard a rescue vessel in the Mediterranean Sea.
Doctors Without Borders, one of the operators of the rescue ship Aquarius, said the boy was born to Nigerian parents in international waters Monday morning. He was named Newman Otas.
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Jonquil Nicholl, a midwife with the aid group who delivered the baby, said it was “a very normal birth in dangerously abnormal conditions.”
Parents Otas and Faith and older brothers Victory and Rollres were rescued from a rubber boat trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya a day previously.
The baby’s mother said she was panicking before the rescue that she would go into labour, and had been having contractions for three days.