Libya delays Aids sentences

2005-11-15 13:23

Tripoli - Libya on Tuesday again delayed making a ruling on whether five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor should be executed by firing squad for allegedly infecting more than 400 children with HIV.

Supreme Court Presiding Judge Ali al-Alus announced a decision had been adjourned to January 31 in a case being closely watched all over the world as the regime of Moamer Kadhafi bids to emerge from its past as a pariah state.

Hundreds of family members and friends of the victims demonstrated outside the court, demanding that the death sentences be carried out.

Six medical workers were arrested in 1999 and sentenced to death in May 2004 for having knowingly injected with HIV-tainted blood 426 Libyan children in the Al-Fatah Children's hospital in Benghazi.

Lack of hygiene 'causes HIV'

At least 48 of the children had already died of the infection.

The Benghazi court that condemned the medics rejected testimony from Luc Montaignier, the French doctor who first isolated the HIV virus, and Swiss and Italian colleagues, who said 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.

Ivan Nenov, the husband of one of the nurses detained in Libya since 1999, said: "We have little hope left as my wife and her work-mates have been turned into an object of trade in the international political context. Libya will trade them at a price it wishes to."

Torture, sexual assault

Bulgaria's foreign minister Ivaylo Kalfin said his country refused to buy the freedom of the nurses by paying compensation to the families of the children.

Human Rights Watch said four of the six defendants had told the New York-based rights watchdog in May that they had confessed after enduring torture, including beatings, electric shock and sexual assault.

Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, Sarah Whitson, said: "There are credible allegations of torture against the foreign health workers.

"The Libyan Supreme Court should take these facts into account and reject the death sentences."

Ramshackle health system

Both the United States and the European Union had put pressure on Tripoli to release the health workers and offered to help them combat the spread of Aids by improving its ramshackle health system.

During a visit on Friday to Croatia, Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem said the case of the six was "a legal problem which has nothing to do with politics".

Libya's ambassador to London, Mohammed Al-Zaoui, said Libya was in "constant contact with the British (presidency of the EU) about the subject".

He said: "I believe that it is possible to reach an arrangement, satisfactory to both the Libyan and the Bulgarian sides, and (one that could) lead out of the impasse."

Had the death sentence be confirmed, execution would not have followed immediately.

- AFP