'Aids' nurses face retrial
2006-05-11 09:09
Tripoli - Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor held in jail since 1999 on charges of infecting Libyan children with Aids are due to face a retrial on Thursday after their death sentences were quashed.
Since the sentences were scrapped on Christmas Day, relations been Tripoli and Sofia had been strained by the publication in Bulgaria of cartoons of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi deemed offensive by Tripoli.
On a visit to Bulgaria last month, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, said the nurses had spent "too long in captivity" and voiced hope they would soon be freed.
The nurses and the doctor were convicted on May 6 2004 by a court in Benghazi, Libya, of charges of having knowingly injected at least 426 children with Aids-contaminated blood at a local hospital. Fifty-one of the children had since died.
Procedural flaws
The six accused pleaded innocence before Libya's supreme court, which last December 25 ordered a retrial and scrapped the original death sentences due to "procedural flaws".
In the search for a deal, Sofia and Tripoli had set up a fund to help fight Aids in Libya and supported the families of the infected children.
The fund was seen as a compromise between Libya's demands for compensation and Bulgaria's refusal to pay anything other than "humanitarian aid" on the basis that the nurses were innocent.
On Monday, defence lawyers renewed their call for the Bulgarian nurses to be released on bail.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the families, Idriss Lagha, said the sick children would be sent for treatment in French and Italian hospitals within the next two weeks.
Two hundred children would travel to hospitals in Paris and Marseille, and about the same number to Rome and Milan.
Families demand $10m for compensation
The spokesperson said: "We renew our confidence in Libyan justice and we call on the outside world not to interfere in the justice system of an independent said."
For the defence, a co-discoverer of the Aids virus, Luc Montagnier, and Italian professor Vitorio Colizzi said the deadly disease had spread before the nurses' arrival in Libya and was due to poor hygiene in Benghazi Hospital.
According to reports, the families had been demanding $10m for each of the 426 contaminated children.
The figure would amount to the same compensation paid by Libya to the families of 270 victims of the Pan Am plane bombing over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in 1988.
On the diplomatic front, last week Libya summoned the Bulgarian ambassador in Tripoli to voice concerns over the publication of the Kadhafi cartoons in the Bulgarian daily Novinar on May 3.
Tripoli said the cartoons "discredit Libyan justice" and described them as "an insult to the Libyan people".