Libya to Pronounce Bulgarian Nurses' Slander Case Sentences May 27

Politics | May 6, 2007, Sunday // 00:00

The regional court in Tripoli will pronounce the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor's sentences on the slander case, they are tried in, on May 27.

That became clear during the seventh hearing on the case, which took place on the day when all Bulgarians celebrate the huge holiday of St. George and marked exactly three years since the nurses were proclaimed guilty and for the first time heard they were sentenced to death.

The five Bulgarian defendants were not in the court room by their own will.

All Bulgarian lawyers have also missed the hearing as they did not manage to get visas after the hearing was postponed April 29 for as early as May 6.

For that reason the defence of the Bulgarians was presented by the Libyan lawyer Osman Bizanti, who demanded annulment of the trial.

Eight of the eleven Libyan policemen, who tortured the medics, have lodged complaints against the nurses, demanding about 23 M of Libyan dinars. The prosecution demands the heaviest punishment - three years behind bars.

The slander trial started on February 25. The five nurses and the Palestinian doctor claim that the confessions they made about intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV were extracted from them by horrific and most barbarous tortures.

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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