Medics get death sentence in AIDS trial

By Afaf Geblawi in Tripoli
December 19, 2006 09:42pm

A TRIPOLI court condemned to death five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor today on charges of spreading HIV-AIDS among hundreds of children in a Libyan hospital.

The defendants burst into tears on hearing the judge's sentence while the families of sick or dead victims started to celebrate what they termed "a just verdict", singing and dancing outside the court.

Amid international outrage over the case, Bulgaria sent a high-level foreign ministry official to the hearing, the Libyan news agency JANA said.

The medical workers, held for the past seven years, had previously been sentenced in May 2004 to face a firing squad, before Libya's supreme court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.

Relatives of the victims carried portraits of their dead or sick children outside the heavily guarded courtroom as Libyan security forces fired into the air before the verdict was read out to keep the crowds at bay. >>>cont

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