Libya Backs H.I.V. Case Death Penalty

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

The Libyan Supreme Court today once again upheld the death sentences imposed on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 Libyan children with the AIDS virus in 1998.

The court rejected the results of a 2003 investigation by two of the world’s leading AIDS experts, which found that unsanitary medical conditions at Benghazi Children’s Hospital were to blame for the children becoming infected with HIV. The nurses and doctor have now been in jail for nearly a decade.

Still, their fate remained uncertain today, despite the court’s ruling on the one hand, and months of recent negotiations to secure their release on the other. The European Union and the United States have repeatedly pressed the Libyan government to free the six, and groups of Nobel laureates have visited Tripoli to plead their case with the Libyan leader, Moammar Ghaddafi.

Another Libyan legal body, the Supreme Judicial Council, is scheduled to meet on Monday, and could overturn today’s court ruling or reduce the sentences for the six.

Reaction to the verdict in Europe today was was swift and dismayed.

“I deeply regret the verdict of the Supreme Court confirming the death sentence for the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor,” said Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the union’s commissioner for external relations, who visited Libya in the spring.

“I firmly hope that clemency will be granted to the medical staff,” Ms. Ferrero-Waldner said. “This should be done in the same spirit of mutual respect and humanitarian compassion which characterized the European response to the plight of the Benghazi children and their families.”

Unusually, several senior officials of the union issued independent statements on the matter as well, including the commissioner for justice, Franco Frattini, who said his reaction was “utterly negative.”

In the past year, the European Union has given substantial financial aid to Libya in hopes of resolving the case. One high-level union diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the total amount was equivalent to more than 10 million euros ($14 million) for each infected child. The union has set up treatment programs in Libya for the children, built medical facilities and purchased equipment.

Bulgaria became a member of the European Union at the beginning of this year. Its entry into the union has raised the public profile of a case that had been simmering on the back burner for years.

Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, the husband of one of the jailed nurses, said in a telephone interview from Libya today that the families of the nurses were dismayed by the ruling. “After spending more than eight monstrous years in Libyan dungeons, we are exhausted to death,” he said. Dr. Georgiev was himself initially charged and jailed in the case; he was released after four years, but has not been allowed to leave Libya.

“We expected for the third time to hear the word ‘death,’ and despite that, it’s still a shock,” he said. “We don’t need a pardon, we need justice.”

In recent weeks, representatives of the Gadhafi Foundation, a charitable organization run by the Libyan leader’s son, have said repeatedly that a deal to free the five nurses and the doctor was imminent. Multiple calls to the foundation’s offices in Tripoli were not immediately returned or answered today.

Under Islamic law, the families of the children can accept compensation for the injury and express forgiveness, which would lead to the dismissal of the charges against the six. Libyan negotiators have long said that that would be the easiet way to resolve the matter, according to Bulgarian and European diplomats involved in the discussions.

But the Bulgarians have refused to consider suggestions that it offer to pay the families 10 million euros for each infected child, on the ground that making such payments would be tantamount to an admission of guilt, and that in any case the country could not afford that amount of money.

Dimiter Tzantchev, the foreign minister of Bulgaria, said in a statement today that the court’s decision was not a surprise, and that his country “is ready to react appropriately in the next days following the development of the situation.” He said there would be no further official comment today.

While the Gadhafi Foundation has said it was brokering an agreement with the children’s families to resolve the case, there have been continuing signals that the families would not easily be placated. “We are awaiting the execution of the death sentence,” the families’ lawyer, Al-Monseif Khalifa, said in Tripoli today, according to Reuters, which noted that members of 20 of the families demonstrated outside the court.

Analysts said that part of the problem was that Mr. Gadhafi is not popular in Benghazi, analysts said, and his government may not feel that it is in a position to reverse a death sentence that is widely viewed as just and proper there.

The convoluted case began more than a decade ago, in 1998, before Bulgaria was a member of the European Union and before Mr. Gadhafi renounced terrorism. At a time of economic upheaval and rapid inflation in Bulgaria, the five nurses, who were then in their late 30s and 40s, signed contracts to work at Benghazi Children’s Hospital for mundane reasons: to buy an apartment or to put a daughter through college. The Palestinain doctor had grown up in Libya.

The six were arrested in 1999. In the initial indictment, which reads like a spy novel, Libyan prosecutors claimed that the nurses intentionally infected the children as part of a plot by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to undermine the Libyan state. Prosecutors claimed that the nurses confessed to the crime, and that investigators had found vials of tainted blood in one of the nurses’ rooms. For their part, the nurses said they were tortured and raped while in custody, in order to extract confessions from them.

In 2001, two of the world’s foremost AIDS experts, Dr. Luc Montagnier of France and Dr. Vittorio Colizzi of Italy, were invited by the Gadhafi Foundation to study the evidence and were granted wide access to the hospital. They concluded that poor sanitary practices — such as the transfusion of unsafe blood products — had led to the spread of the AIDS virus, and added that medical records indicated that some of the children had AIDS before the accused nurses arrived in Libya. Libyan authorities refused to provide the scientists with the vial of blood used in evidence.

Last year, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a petition asking Libya to release the nurses and the doctor. The petition was delivered by hand to Moammar Gaddafi.

Reached by phone today, several member of the group said they had agreed not to discuss the case until later this week, or until there was a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Council.

Dr. Colizzi, who has visited the hospital in Benghazi several times over the last few years to help develop treatment programs there, said today, “I think all we can say for now it that this is incredible, really incredible.”