As the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor await a verdict in Tripoli on charges that they spread HIV to 426 Libyan children, hundreds of prominent scientists are rallying in their defense, calling for a new fair trial.

The five nurses and the doctor were foreign experts working at Al Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya, in 1998, when an outbreak of HIV was detected at the hospital, reminds International Herald Tribune.

The Libyan authorities, including the country's leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, blamed the foreigners for the outbreak, suggesting that they had intentionally injected Libya's children with the virus.

But a 2003 independent scientific report on the outbreak, by two of Europe's most prominent AIDS experts who spent many weeks in Libya reviewing the evidence, concluded that poor sanitary practices at the hospital were to blame.

Despite that report, commissioned by the Libyan government, the six have been in prison in Libya since their arrest in 1999, and they were sentenced to death in 2004.

A new trial was ordered after international protests. In August, when the second trial started, prosecutors again requested the death penalty. The trial ended Saturday when the presiding judge said a verdict would be announced on Dec. 19.

The expert report was not presented at the new trial, which is now close to conclusion. On Saturday, the judge said that the six would be sentenced on Dec. 19, Reuters reported.

The two experts, Dr. Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, and Dr. Vittorio Colizzi of Italy, said they had not been called to testify.

On the Web site of the journal Nature, 114 Nobel laureates signed an open letter to Qaddafi. By not allowing "independent scientific evidence" to be presented at the trial, the letter said, "a miscarriage of justice will take place without proper consideration of scientific evidence."

Dr. Richard Roberts, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said he delivered the letter on Tuesday to Ambassador Attia Mubarak, the leader of the Libyan mission to the UN.

 Print This Article      Email This Article