US and EU leaders vowed to step up efforts to free five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on charges of intentionally infecting more than 400 children with the AIDS virus, at a summit late on Monday.

"While reaffirming our sympathy to the children infected with HIV/AIDS in Libya, we will reinforce our efforts aimed at the release and exoneration of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor sentenced to death against all scientific evidence," the joint statement released at the end of the summit read.

Both the EU and the US pledged to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases.

Reports by Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, have proved beyond doubt that unhygienic medical practices fuelled the outbreak.

On the basis of case records and genomic analyses done in Europe, they proved that some of the children had been infected even before the workers' arrival at the hospital.

The HIV infections, the experts concluded, were caused by poor sanitary practices.

But this scientific evidence was ultimately thrown out, and in 2004, the six were sentenced to death by firing squad, a sentence confirmed at a second trial last year.

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