Bulgarian lawyers will not be in the court room during the next hearing of the defamation trial against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, jailed in Libya in a travesty HIV trial.

The Bulgarian defenders are unable to get visas after the hearing was postponed last Sunday for as early as May 6.

The news was broken by the Bulgarian lawyer Hari Haralampiev, who told Darik News that he and his colleague have prepared the defence but it will be presented by the Libyan lawyer Osman Bizanti.

May 6, the day when all Bulgarians honour the holy martyr St George the Victor, would mark three years since the nurses were found guilty of deliberately starting a HIV outbreak in a kids' Benghazi hospital and sentenced to death.

The slander trial started on February 25. The five nurses and the Palestinian doctor claim that they were tortured into confessing they deliberately infected Libyan children with HIV. Charges have been raised by eight Libyan officers so far.

The medics have been in detention since 1999, during which time more than 50 of the 426 infected children have died of AIDS.

The plight of the Bulgarian nurses has sparked an international outcry.

Major scientific 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, proved beyond doubt that unhygienic medical practices fuelled the outbreak. As a result hundreds of children in a Libyan hospital contracted HIV in the late 1990s, the scientists say.

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