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Libya Sentences Bulgarians To Death For Distributing Tainted Blood ProductsLibya Sentences Bulgarians To Death For Distributing Tainted Blood Products
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Subjects > World > Countries?Create > Bulgaria
20:12 - May 6, 2004
BENGHAZI (BGNES)- A Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor on Thursday to death by firing squad after convicting them of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the deadly HIV virus.
Bulgaria condemned the "unfair and absurd" verdicts announced by court officials and called for a strong reaction from its Western partners -- the European Union, NATO and the United States. The issue is a major hurdle to Libya joining an EU economic partnership with Mediterranean region countries.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who is seeking closer ties with the West after more than a decade of international isolation, had promised to swiftly resolve the dispute during a ground-breaking visit to EU headquarters in Brussels last week.
The condemned, detained in February 1999, were convicted of infecting 426 Libyan children at a Benghazi hospital with blood products contaminated with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. They had pleaded not guilty, insisting they were not to blame for the epidemic which Libya says has killed more than 40 children since 1999.
Prosecutors charged them with "uncontrollable murder aimed at destabilizing the country, deliberately starting an epidemic...and conspiring to intentionally infect children with the AIDS virus".
In 2001 Gadhafi said the children were infected as part of an experiment ordered by the U.S. or Israeli secret services.
Defense lawyers said there was no hard evidence in the indictment except for confessions by two of the nurses.
Nine Libyans have been on trial for torturing the confessions out of them.
A Bulgarian doctor, Zdravko Georgiev, the husband of one of the nurses, was jailed for four years, lawyers said.
Defense lawyers said they would appeal the sentences.
POOR HYGIENE
Scores of dancing and chanting relatives of the HIV-infected children took to the streets near the court in the Mediterranean port city after the verdicts were announced.
"The verdict is fair. What they did is a crime against humanity. They planted a bomb inside our children," said Ramdane Ali Mohamed, whose younger sister Hiba died of AIDS.
In Brussels, the European Commission said it was "deeply disappointed" by the verdict.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, in Washington, told CNN: "These sentences are unacceptable from both a legal and moral point of view. It is ridiculous that the victims are sentenced to death." Parliament Speaker Ognyan Gerdzhikov said he was confident the sentences would not be carried out.
"First, they can be appealed. Secondly, Libya has not executed death sentences in nine years, and I'd be very surprised if they start now. Thirdly, I expect Gadhafi to act like a humanist to win certain political credit which he needs from world public opinion," he told national radio.
"It a shocking verdict. My clients expected to be convicted for dereliction of duty and sentenced to prison terms not death," defense lawyer Othmane Bizanti told Reuters. Last year Luc Montagnier, the French doctor credited with first discovering the HIV virus, said the epidemic emerged in the Libyan hospital in 1997, a year before the medics arrived.
He testified that the children were most probably infected through negligence and poor hygiene.
In Dublin, Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgham said he opposed the death penalty but could not interfere, an EU spokesman said.
"I very much hope the Libyans will move rapidly to meet our concerns and the very legitimate concerns of the Bulgarian government," EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten told a news conference after meeting Shalgham.
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