Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Agence France Presse (12.17.06) - Monday, December 18, 2006
Afaf Geblawi
The six defendants, whom prosecutors allege deliberately infected 426 children with HIV while working at the Al-Fateh hospital, have been detained since February 1999. A May 2004 sentence of death was overturned on appeal by Libya's Supreme Court in December 2005.
The six are awaiting their Dec. 19 verdicts "with anguish," Othman al-Bizanti, their Libyan defense attorney, said Sunday.
The European Union and Bulgaria, which joins the union on Jan. 1, 2007, have both called for the six to be acquitted. The Council of Europe in Strasbourg has decried what it said is the denial of the defendants' basic rights. Human rights groups said confessions previously entered by defendants, now recanted, were extracted by torture.
Defense attorneys have argued the children were infected before the six workers arrived to work in the Benghazi hospital. That claim is supported by a genetic study published this month in the scientific journal Nature that shows the "molecular clock" of the outbreak would predate the defendants' arrival. The likeliest scenario explaining the infections, the study suggested, was the unsterile reuse of syringes and other intravenous equipment.
In November, the Lancet published an editorial strongly criticizing the case as lacking legal foundations. The editorial cited independent scientific evidence that the children's infections were caused by poor infection control practices at the hospital prior to the defendants' tenure at Al-Fateh.
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