Foreign medics sentenced to death in Libya AIDS case

A Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician to death on Dec. 19, convicting them of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV/AIDS, in a re-trial ordered after a court reached the same verdict in 2004. European and American human rights and physician groups have loudly condemned both trials.

The scientific evidenced used against them, "is so irrational it's unbelieveable," said one of a number of international scientists who have visited Libya to study the case and treat the infected children, many of whom have died. Outraged families celebrated the verdict. 

Scientists studying the case concluded that the outbreak of HIV in 1998 that infected 400 children at a children's hospital was nosocomial, resulting from the reuse of contaminated medical equipment. The defendants stood accused of deliberately injecting the children with the virus.

The Libyan court did not allow scientific evidence that could have proved accidental infection of the children. "Science has not been respected in this court," said Richard Roberts, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who delivered a letter of protest signed by 100 Nobel laureates to the Libyan Mission in New York.

Sources: "HIV Injustice in Lybia: Scapegoating Foreign Medical Professionals," N Engl J Med 355;24, December 14, 2006.

"Foreign Medics sentenced to die in Lybia case," Reuters, December 19,2006.