quote:
By KHALED EL-DEEB AND WILLA THAYERTRIPOLI, Libya (AP) - A court on Tuesday convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor of deliberately infecting 400 children with the HIV virus and sentenced them to death, provoking condemnation from Bulgaria and shouts of joy in Tripoli.
"God is great!" yelled Ibrahim Mohammed al-Aurabi, the father of an infected child, as soon as the presiding judge finished reading the verdict in the Tripoli courtroom. "Long live the Libyan judiciary!"
Bulgaria swiftly condemned the decision, and reiterated its belief that the children were infected by unhygienic conditions in their Benghazi hospital.
"Sentencing innocent people to death is an attempt to cover up the real culprits and the real reasons for the AIDS outbreak in Benghazi," said Bulgarian parliamentary speaker Georgi Pirinski.
The five Bulgarians and the Palestinian sat stony-faced and made no reaction as the judge finished delivering the verdict. . . .
. . .Luc Montagnier - the French doctor who was a co-discoverer of HIV - testified in the first trial that the deadly virus was active in the hospital before the Bulgarian nurses began their contracts there in 1998.
More evidence for that argument surfaced on Dec. 6 - too late to be submitted in court - when Nature magazine published an analysis of HIV and hepatitis virus samples from the children.
Using changes in the genetic information of HIV over time as a "molecular clock," the analysts concluded that the virus was contracted before the six defendants arrived at the hospital - perhaps even three years before.
Idriss Lagha, the president of a group representing the victims, rejected the Nature article, telling a press conference in London on Monday that the nurses had infected the children with a "genetically engineered" virus. He accused them as doing so for research on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies.
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posted 19 December 2006 04:04 AM
