Libya HIV outbreak was deliberate, court hears
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Someone deliberately infected hundreds of children with HIV/AIDS at a Libyan hospital, Libyan experts on Tuesday told a court retrying five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of causing the outbreak.
The retrial, as well as questions over Libya’s human rights record, have been seen as hurdles to improved relations with the West at a time when Washington is in the process of resuming full diplomatic relations after decades of hostility.
Five Libyan experts on HIV/AIDS told the Tripoli court that they stood by a 61-page report they wrote in 2003 that found the infections were the result of a deliberate act.
The report was submitted as evidence in the previous trial, which ended with the six convicted of intentionally infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV when they worked in the Benghazi hospital.
In December 2005, the supreme court overturned the convictions, which were based on confessions by the accused and had resulted in sentences of death by firing squad.
“This report is real and we are honest in reporting from the files which are available in the hospital and according to the cases which we interviewed,” one of the five, Othman Shabani, a medical doctor, said.
Court President Mahmoud Haouissa later adjourned the retrial until August 29.
The Palestinian Ashraf Alhajouj and the Bulgarians, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropolu, Christiana Valcheva and Valia Cherveniashka, have pleaded not guilty and said they had been beaten or tortured to make them confess.
Washington has long backed Bulgaria and the European Union in saying the physician and nurses, jailed in Libya since 1999, are innocent.
Haouissa has declined to allow international HIV/AIDS experts to testify in defence of the accused. International experts testified in the first trial that the outbreak at the Benghazi hospital where the accused worked began before they arrived.
Tripoli has suggested the nurses could go free if Bulgaria pays compensation to the children and their families, who have demanded 4.4 billion euros ($5.5 billion). Bulgaria has refused to pay, but has joined the United States, the EU and Libya in agreeing to back the creation of an aid fund.
About 50 of the HIV-infected children have died, fuelling anger in Libya, but analysts say the offer of aid may give Tripoli a face-saving opportunity to free the six.
Bulgaria’s deputy foreign minister Feim Chaushev, ending a surprise three-day visit to Tripoli, said earlier this week he was confident the Bulgarians would return home in coming months.
After the court session ended, defence lawyer Othman Bizanti told Reuters: “We see this spread of AIDS as a result of malpractice at the hospital, and we have many proofs of that. It’s the opposite of what the local experts said.”
Ramadan Faitori, the spokesman for a group representing the families of the infected children, praised the local experts’ report as “scientific and strong.”
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