TRIPOLI, May 6 (AFP) - A Libyan court Thursday sentenced five Bulgarian women nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad after convicting them of deliberately spreading AIDS in a children's hospital, sparking fierce reactions to a verdict that could damage Libya's improving ties with the West.
The accused were convicted of having deliberately infected more than 400 children with the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS, of whom 43 have since died, by injecting them with tainted blood products.
The official verdict obtained by AFP also ordered them to pay a total of one million dollars in compensation to the families of the victims.
The court ordered a Bulgarian doctor, named in Sofia as Zdravko Georgiev, to be jailed for up to four years along with three Libyans for "trafficking in foreign currency."
However, they, along with five other Libyans, were acquitted of spreading AIDS.
European Commission chief Romano Prodi -- who only last week hosted a landmark visit by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi during which the issue was raised -- said he was disappointed at the ruling and urged a review.
"The commission is extremely preoccupied and deeply disappointed by the court's ruling," he said.
"The commission remains in contact with the Libyan authorities and will urge them to reconsider the case to reach a satisfactory situation at the soonest."
EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten expressed his "considerable shock and concern" at the news. "It does cast a shadow over a relationship which we hoped was getting better," he said.
Libyan Foreign Minister Abdulrahman Mohamed Shalgham was told of the "consternation in the EU" during a meeting in Dublin with representatives of the bloc, an EU official said.
"We conveyed the Union's profound concern at today's verdict. We also told them we were profoundly disturbed by the conviction of these defendants," said Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen.
The death sentences were a "very negative surprise", Cowen said.
Shalgham was leading a Libyan delegation which has observer status at a Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers' meeting in the Irish capital.
But in Brussels a commission spokesman said that for the EU "the case is not closed. There is a possibility of appeal and other possibilities. We are not in a situation where a final decision has been taken."
Prodi noted that the EU "has repeatedly expressed its serious concerns regarding the conduct of the investigations, the treatment of the defendants and the delays in bringing the case to a conclusion."
"It has also expressed concerns about the lack of compelling evidence of the guilt of the defendants," he added.
Bulgaria, a candidate for membership in the EU, slammed the sentence as "unacceptable", and said there would be an appeal.
The defendants were in the court in the northern city of Benghazi when the sentence was handed down in line with a law "which stipulates capital punishment for whoever causes the death of more than one person", a judicial source said.
The source said the defendants did not react in court to the verdict, which was read out with international observers present.
Relatives of the infected children who had attended the trial, expressed their joy at the sentences in the streets of Benghazi.
Libya's Justice Minister Ali al-Hasnawi told AFP that he had "full confidence in the Libyan justice system" and stressed that the seven could appeal to his country's supreme court.
In Sofia, Bulgaria's parliament speaker Ognian Guerdjikov said he was sure the Bulgarians would not be executed.
"I expect that Moamer Kadhafi will behave like a humanitarian in order to win the political influence which he wants to have within the international community," Guerdjikov told Bulgarian state radio.
The Bulgarian government called the sentence "unacceptable for the Bulgarian government and state. There will be an appeal," government spokesman Dimitar Tsonev told BNT national television.
"The Bulgarian government will continue all its efforts to mobilise the international community, the European Union and the United States in order to obtain a fair sentence from another court," Tsonev said.
The doctors, held for the past five years, told judges that their confessions were extracted under duress, while two Bulgarians said they were forced to sign statements in Arabic that they could not understand.
The verdicts were seen as crucial for the international standing of Libya, which has been moving to rejoin the world community since it agreed in December to disarm its weapons of mass destruction programs.
Prodi said during Khadafi's visit to Brussels that a fair trial was a condition for Libya to join the EU's partnership with countries of the Mediterranean basin.
Washington has also been pressing Libya for the release of the seven health workers, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday.
US-Libyan ties have improved dramatically since Tripoli's renunciation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, with US diplomats now present in the Libyan capital for the first time in more than 20 years.
Kadhafi said in 2001 that the case might involve a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Israeli Mossad plot to experiment with the HIV virus.
But the lawyers for the defendants have said their clients are being used as scapegoats for inadequate sterilisation of instruments at the paediatric hospital in Benghazi before the Bulgarians and the Palestinian arrived in 1998.
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