Italian Characters are stored as "?" in the database.

I have a strange problem.

My application supports Internationalization for Italian, French and German languages. The database is - MySQL 5.0.45 and the 'my.cnf' file has the following entries about the character set:

Under - [mysqld] - Section
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'

and under - [mysql] ? Section
default-character-set=utf8

In the JSPs, the tag's content is set to "text/html charset=UTF-8".
All the tables are created in the InnoDB engine with defaul charset = UTF-8 and ENGINE = Innodb

Application server: Sun ONE App server 9.1
Operating System: Redhat Linux Server version 4 Update 6.

Italian characters (? & ?) are stored as ? in the database. They are properly rendered on the browser and in the application log on the app server they are displayed as - ? & ? respectively.

Note: When I deploy the application on Windows XP box, the characters are stored & displayed properly. Whereas, it behaves strangely on RHL box.

Please help me.

Thank you in advance.