Libya on Saturday denounced a decision by Bulgaria’s president to pardon six medics from life jail terms in an Aids case as a ”betrayal” and illegal. ”The detainees should have been detained upon their arrival [in Sofia], and not freed in this celebratory and illegal manner,” Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgham said.
A Libyan court acquitted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medic on Sunday of charges of slandering police officers by protesting that their confessions had been extracted under torture. The ruling came just hours after an organisation headed by a son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi said the whole saga may soon be resolved.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi joked with journalists and bounded up a flight of stairs to dispel rumours about his health after a report he was in a coma suffering a blood clot to the brain. The veteran leader appeared before journalists and television cameras late on Monday.
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/ 19 December 2006
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”.
The Tripoli criminal court heard testimony from prosecution witnesses on Tuesday as the re-trial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of infecting Libyan children with the Aids virus resumed and was then adjourned until July 25. The three witnesses, a father and two mothers, appeared with their infected children before Judge Mahmud al-Huweissa.
The retrial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of contaminating hundreds of Libyan children with Aids reopened on Tuesday with the judge calling for the process to be speeded up. Judge Mahmud al-Huweissa adjourned the trial to June 20 after a brief session.
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.
Basking in its two-year-old rapprochement with the West, Libya boasts that this year its commemorations of Washington’s deadly 1986 air strikes on its main cities will be joined by Western stars. Veteran United States soul singer Lionel Ritchie and Spanish tenor Jose Carreras are among the acts that Libya says will be performing in the capital.