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On Wednesday (May 5), a special Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for purposely infecting 426 children with HIV in a Benghazi pediatrics hospital in 1998. The case, which has become something of a cause celebre within the AIDS science and clinical communities, is expected to be appealed.Authorities arrested the six healthcare workers in 1999 after several dozen children from the hospital became infected with HIV. Two of them issued confessions. Both later claimed the confessions had been issued under duress and no known evidence has been shown to implicate them otherwise.In a separate case alleging trafficking in foreign currency, three Libyans and a Bulgarian doctor, Zdravko Georgiev, were sentenced to 3 to 4 years in prison. The Bulgarian doctor, whose wife is one of those sentenced to death, was released, because his sentence was less than the time he had already served.Prominent AIDS researchers have taken up the defendants' cause. Testifying at the trial in 2003, Luc Montagnier said that the AIDS outbreak was probably due to poor hygiene at the hospital before the arrival of the foreigners. Other AIDS researchers who have publicly supported the defendants include Danail Beshkov of the National AIDS laboratory in Bulgaria, Vittorio Colizzi of the Tor Vegatta University in Rome, and Luc Perrin of the Geneva University Hospital. According to epidemiological studies done by Perrin and Montagnier, the outbreak was most probably due to repeated use of the same syringe after an infected child was treated for other ailments.After the reading of the sentence Wednesday, relatives of the young victims shouted approval inside the courthouse and then held a demonstration in the streets outside, according to Reuters. “The verdict is fair. What they did is a crime against humanity. They planted a bomb inside our children,” Ramdane Ali Mohamed, whose sister was infected in the hospital and died of AIDS-related causes, told the Reuters reporter who covered the trial.The court also ordered the six defendants, who would be killed by firing squad, to pay $1 million in compensation to the families of the victims.The supreme leader of Libya, Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, said in 2001 that the accused were part of an Israeli plot to kill Libya's children. Since then, he has publicly avoided comment and has waved off all pleas by visiting statesmen to intervene, saying that the matter is an internal judicial affair. “The accusations against the Bulgarians are hard to justify,” said US undersecretary for European and EurAsian affairs Robert Bradke at a press conference in February 2004. “They should be released.”According to Libyan law, any death penalty conviction is subject to automatic appeal. No death sentences are known to have been carried out in Libya for the past 9 years. Even if the appeal fails, Qaddafi could still offer a pardon. “I expect Qaddafi to act like a humanist to win certain political credit, which he needs from world public opinion,” Bulgarian parliament speaker Ognyan Gerdzhikov told Reuters.The 4-year-long case has taken place against the backdrop of the emergence of Libya from 2 decades of international sanctions following admissions that the nation bombed a Pan Am passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1989 and had a vibrant weapons of mass destruction program. Many Western governments are loathe to criticize the government at a time when it is just beginning to engage the outside world.

Clinicians sentenced to death

Foreigners worked in a Libyan hospital where 426 children were infected with HIV

May 6, 2004

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