Nurses 'gave' kids Aids
2005-03-29 15:07
Tripoli - A Libyan court is set to hear on Tuesday an appeal by five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face the death penalty for allegedly infecting children with the Aids virus.
The case has provoked tensions between Libya and Bulgaria, whose Foreign Minister Solomon Passy raised the issue with United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
However, Bulgarian Prime Minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg said on Friday: "The less we speak of it and the less we try to politicise the process, the better their chances are."
The six health workers were sentenced to death in March last year for infecting 380 children with the HIV virus through contaminated blood at a hospital in Benghazi on Libya's Mediterranean coast.
Confessed after torture
The defendants, who have already spent six years in jail, all maintain their innocence. Two nurses and the doctor initially confessed to the charges but later claimed police extracted their confessions with torture including beatings and electric shocks.
Forty-seven children at the pediatric hospital have died of the disease, but the Benghazi court that condemned the health workers to death rejected testimony from Luc Montaignier, the French doctor who first isolated the HIV virus, and Swiss and Italian colleagues, that the epidemic was due to a lack of hygiene.
Instead the court based its verdict on a report by Libyan experts that placed the blame on the foreign health workers.
The Bulgarian press said the six were made "scapegoats" in a bid to calm the public outrage that the epidemic has provoked in Libya.
Fears for the fate of the nurses rose further last week when Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, during an Arab League summit, criticised Western attempts to win their release.
"The Bulgarians have killed our children. I swear by Allah that some Western officials come to me and say, 'We want to take them (the nurses) back today, so release them,'" Kadhafi said in Algiers.
"We told them that the day the court sentenced the nurses to death, demonstrations in support (of their death sentence) were held in Benghazi. The West told us, the opinions of your people do not interest us, our people are sheep and that we have no public opinion."
Tripoli has said that in exchange for the freedom of the nurses, it wants compensation equal to that paid by Libya to relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie plane bombing carried out by its secret service in 1988.
But Bulgarian authorities have rejected the demand, saying that giving in would amount to acknowledging the guilt of the six.
One of the defence lawyers, Egyptian Amin al-Dib, said; "There is not the faintest proof that these five women committed the crime of which they have been accused," he told a Bulgarian newspaper.