The families of Libyan children infected with the Aids have dropped demands for the death penalty in the case of six foreign medics on death row in the case, a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
The announcement came as Libya’s top legal body was to rule on Tuesday on the medics’ fate, and after victims’ families started receiving millions of dollars in a compensation deal likely to result in a reprieve.
“We have renounced the death penalty … after all our conditions were met,” Idriss Lagha said.
A document to that effect has been sent to the Judicial Council, which was set to meet on Tuesday evening to decide the fate of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor, he added.
The Gadaffi Foundation involved in mediating a resolution to the case that has dragged on for eight years and strained ties with the West has previously said the compensation amounts to about $1-million per child.
The medics, who have been behind bars since 1999, were convicted of deliberately injecting 438 children in a Benghazi hospital with HIV-tainted blood, but Lagha has said the number of victims has risen to about 460 with several mothers now infected.
Fifty-six children have since died.
The Judicial Council, headed by the justice minister, had initially been expected to review the sentence on Monday in possibly the final legal hurdle for the medics, but then decided to adjourn until Tuesday.
The death penalty against the five Bulgarians and the Palestinian doctor who now has Bulgarian citizenship was confirmed by the Supreme Court last Wednesday, sparking renewed international concern over their fate.
Nurses Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valya Cherveniashka, Valentina Siropulo and Kristiana Valcheva and doctor Ashraf Juma Hajuj have always pleaded their innocence.
They say confessions were extracted under torture and foreign experts have blamed poor hygiene at the hospital for the Aids outbreak in Libya’s second city of Benghazi on the Mediterranean coast.
But European Union External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner expressed hope for a positive outcome.
“I do hope that the high judicial council today [Tuesday] would come out with a ruling and I do hope of course for clemency for the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian medic,” she said in Brussels.
Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev also urged the panel to make a swift ruling, saying: “We are indeed in the final phase of this trial.”
Zdravko Georgiev, the husband of nurse Valtcheva, said he had received two telephone calls from his wife on Monday in which she said she was “keeping calm and putting her fate in God’s hands”.
“I am optimistic but very stressed. I haven’t eaten or slept for two days,” he said outside the Bulgarian embassy in Tripoli.
Last week, the medics sought “pardon and mercy” from the council, which can uphold, modify or overturn the Supreme Court verdict. Any deal is expected to see the death sentences commuted to prison terms that would be served in Bulgaria.
The Gadaffi Foundation, headed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi’s son Seif al-Islam, said the money was paid to the victims’ families out of a special Benghazi Aids fund created in 2005 by Tripoli and Sofia under EU auspices.
Among the victims are eight Palestinians, two Egyptians, two Syrians, two Sudanese and a Moroccan as well as Libyans, according to Lagha.
Last week, Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgham said the compensation would be paid by “certain European countries and charitable organisations, and from the Libyan state”.
He refused to reveal how much money was already in the fund, except to say it ran into “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The French Le Figaro daily had reported on Saturday that some EEU countries could be involved in the compensation but the European Commission, which has already committed â,¬2,5-million to the fund, has denied it played any role in the deal.
The six medics also face defamation charges brought by a senior police officer over their torture accusations, although this case could also be resolved if the council rules on Tuesday. — AFP