Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of spreading HIV/Aids among children in a Libyan hospital will on Tuesday know whether they will finally be freed or face a firing squad.
Libyan defence lawyer Othman al-Bizanti said at the weekend his clients were awaiting Tuesday’s expected verdict in a Tripoli court ”with anguish”.
Prosecutors have called for the death penalty for the Benghazi Six, whose case — which goes back to their detention in February 1999 — has provoked international outrage, notably in Europe and among doctors and scientists.
The accused, who have all pleaded not guilty, had previously been sentenced in May 2004 to face a firing squad, before Libya’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.
They had worked at the al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi, Libya’s seaside second city on the Mediterranean, where it was alleged they had infected 426 children with HIV, of whom 52 went on to die from Aids.
Reiterating that the medics were innocent, lawyer Bizanti told Agence France-Presse he hoped the court — which began hearing the retrial in May — would finally ”end their ordeal that has gone on for seven years”.
Germany, which takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union on January 1, most recently led international calls for the six to be acquitted, as respected scientific journals in Britain rejected the charges.
”I tried to make it clear to those responsible here that this problem has to be solved,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on a visit last month to Tripoli, which has been keen to enhance its EU ties.
The European Union, which Bulgaria will join on January 1, has similarly called for the release of the Benghazi Six, while the Council of Europe in Strasbourg has denounced what it called a denial of the defendants’ rights.
The case has strained relations between Tripoli and the West as the North African state works its way back into the international fold after renouncing in 2003 its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Families of the dead children have demanded $15-million in compensation for each lost youngster — a claim rejected by the Bulgarian government, which maintains that its nationals in the case are innocent.
Defence lawyers have argued that the children had been infected with HIV — the virus that brings on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — before the nurses arrived to work at the hospital.
In November, the British medical journal the Lancet — in an editorial entitled Free the Benghazi Six — blasted the retrial as a miscarriage of justice with ”no legal foundation”.
It cited independent scientific evidence that the infections were caused by bad hygiene at the Benghazi hospital, and reports from human rights watchdogs that confessions had been extracted under torture.
Earlier this month a British scientific journal, Nature, published the findings of an international team which analysed the genetic identity of the virus that infected the Libyan children.
Using a ”molecular clock” based on the pathogen’s rate of mutation, they concluded that the HIV strain in question had entered the hospital before March 1998 when the six accused began to work at the hospital.
It added that the likeliest cause of the children’s infection was ”nosocomial transmission” through the use of syringes and other intravenous equipment in the hospital that had not been properly sterilised before re-use. – Sapa-AFP