'Aids' nurses' trial adjourned
2006-05-11 22:02
Tripoli - The retrial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor reopened on Thursday. It was adjourned until June 13.
The six have been held in a Libyan jail since 1999, on charges of infecting Libyan children with Aids.
They were convicted on May 6, 2004, by a court in Benghazi, northeastern Libya, on charges of having knowingly injected at least 426 children with Aids-contaminated blood at a local hospital.
The Libyan court sentenced them to death. Fifty-one of the children have since died.
Their verdicts were overturned in a Libyan supreme court ruling on Christmas Day.
Several European diplomats attended the Libyan court on Thursday.
The six's prolonged incarceration has been a subject of controversy at a time when Libya seeks to reintegrate with the international community.
"I am convinced of our innocence," said the Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Hajjuj, just before the retrial opened.
Judge denies nurses bail
"We are the victims, just like all the children suffering from Aids. I hope this drama, in which we have found ourselves without reason, will come to an end."
As proceedings began, the nurses confirmed to the presiding judge that Othman al-Bizanti remained their lawyer. The accused appeared to be in good health.
Presiding judge Mahmud Huwaissa said the trial was being adjourned for procedural reasons.
Libyan prosecutors rejected a request by al-Bizanti for the Bulgarians to be released on bail and the judge ordered the six to remain in detention.
Since the death sentences were quashed, relations been Tripoli and Sofia have been further strained by the Bulgarian publication of cartoons of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.
Tripoli said the cartoons "discredit Libyan justice" and described them as "an insult to the Libyan people".
Forty members of the victims' families protested outside the Libyan court on Thursday. They brandished placards and photos of the sick children.
In the search for a deal, Sofia and Tripoli have set up a fund to help fight Aids in Libya and support the families of the infected children.
Children will be sent to French hospitals
The fund is 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.
Spokesperson for the families, Idriss Lagha, said the infected 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 around the same number to Rome and Milan.
At the six's initial trial, co-discoverer of the Aids virus Luc Montagnier, and Italian professor Vitorio Colizzi, said Aids had spread through the country before the nurses' arrival in Libya.
They said the children's infection was the result of poor hygiene in the Benghazi hospital.
The children's families are demanding $10m for each of the 426 contaminated children.