A Bulgarian engineer arrested in Libya in 1999 with five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, now on retrial for ”knowingly” injecting Libyan children with HIV/Aids-contaminated blood, said on Wednesday he saw the six tortured in detention.
”The nurses were beaten with many-stranded wire, for a long time and painfully. Then they were made to run, crawl, stand on one leg with their hands stretched up. When they collapsed totally, they were dragged somewhere and brought back in a helpless state,” Smilian Tachev told Trud daily newspaper.
Tachev himself spent 174 days in detention in Libya before being released in May 2000 but a Libyan court brought last Thursday new in absentia accusations against him and another Bulgarian, Emanuela Koleva, for the alleged consumption of alcohol in public, defence lawyer Othman al-Bizanti said.
One of the nurses told Tachev her captors set dogs on her and brought a lighted cigarette close to her eyes before removing it at the last second.
Another was force-fed with a probe, while tied on a chair, and later told him they had tortured her with electric shocks. Still another could not move her hands to feed herself and screamed frantically every time they closed the door of her cell, Tachev said.
The nurses and the doctor were sentenced to death on May 6 2004, by a court in Benghazi, north-eastern Libya, on charges of having knowingly injected at least 426 children with HIV/Aids-contaminated blood at a local hospital.
Fifty-three of the children have since died.
The nurses maintained their innocence on the basis of testimony by foreign experts, who said the HIV/Aids epidemic was caused by poor hygiene long before the medics’ arrival at the hospital.
Two of them and the doctor testified they were tortured in jail.
Tripoli’s Supreme Court quashed the death sentences last December, citing ”procedural flaws” and a retrial officially opened on Thursday, but was almost immediately adjourned till June 13.
Bulgaria warned against new delays in the long-running case as the nurses have already been held for seven years in a Libyan prison. – Sapa-AFP