The retrial is due to start on Thursday in Tripoli of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who have been held in jail since 1999 on charges of infecting Libyan children with HIV/Aids.
Since death sentences against the defendants were quashed on Christmas Day, relations been Tripoli and Sofia have been strained by the publication in Bulgaria of cartoons of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to Bulgaria, said last month that 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, north-eastern Libya, of charges of having injected at least 426 children with HIV/Aids-contaminated blood at a local hospital.
Fifty-one of the children have since died.
The six accused pleaded their innocence before Libya’s supreme court which last December 25 ordered a retrial and scrapped the death sentences due to “procedural flaws”.
In the search for a deal, Sofia and Tripoli have set up a fund to help fight HIV/Aids in Libya and support the families of the infected children.
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.
The spokesperson for the families, Idriss Lagha, said on Monday that 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 around the same number to Rome and Milan.
“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,” the spokesperson told Agence France-Presse.
For the defence, the co-discoverer of the HIV/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 bad hygiene in the Benghazi hospital.
But the families have been demanding $10-million for each of the 426 contaminated children, according to Bulgarian television.
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, Libya last week summoned the Bulgarian ambassador in Tripoli to voice concern over the publication of Gadaffi 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”.
One of them showed the Libyan leader playing chess with the nurses and pieces shaped like oil barrels, while in another Gadaffi was disguised as a devil cooking a red soup of nurses’ hats.
The newspaper said it wanted to make Gadaffi “realise the monstrous absurdity of the trial”, while Sofia has distanced itself from the cartoons and said they hope the “isolated incident” would not affect ties.
Rice said the case had dragged on too long.
“We believe very strongly that the Bulgarian nurses have been too long in captivity,” she said during a visit to Sofia. “This is a humanitarian case. It is time for them to go home and we hope that that will happen very soon.”
On Monday, defence lawyers renewed a call for the Bulgarian nurses to be released on bail. – AFP