SOFIA, May 8 (AFP) - Bulgaria said Saturday it will appeal death sentences handed down by a Libyan court on five Bulgarian nurses found guilty of infecting hundreds of children with AIDS, a verdict which could undermine Libya's improving ties with the West.
"We've advised the defense to immediately take action to file an appeal against the verdict," Justice Minister Anton Stankov said after an interministerial meeting in Sofia dealing with the aftermath of the lengthy trial.
"We agree with neither the death sentences handed down nor the so-called guilt" of the nurses, Stankov told reporters.
A court in the northern Libyan city of Benghazi on Thursday sentenced the five nurses as well as a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad for spreading AIDS in a children's hospital, in a saga that has been going on since 1998.
They were also ordered to pay a total of one million dollars (827,000 euros) in compensation to the families of the victims.
The accused were convicted of having deliberately infected more than 400 children with the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS by injecting them with tainted blood products. Forty-three of the children have since died.
All defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges when the trial opened four years ago and the verdicts were postponed several times.
Two of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor said during the trial that they were tortured into making the confessions.
Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi had said in 2001 that the case might be one of a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Israeli Mossad plot to experiment with the AIDS virus.
The lawyers for the defendants have said their clients are being used as scapegoats for inadequate sterilisation of instruments at the pediatric hospital in Benghazi before the medical workers arrived in 1998.
This claim was backed up in court by the French doctor who first isolated the HIV virus.
Luc Montagnier last September told the court that the AIDS epidemic had begun before the arrival of the accused at the hospital and was probably caused by poor hygiene.
But the state prosecutor called on the jury to disregard Montagnier's testimony. He asked for the death penalty based on evidence by a Libyan doctor and on statements to the police.
The European Union and the United States both condemned the verdicts, Washington calling it "unacceptable."
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the legal and human rights of the accused had been violated numerous times since the allegations were first made five years ago and vowed to continue to raise the matter with Libyan officials.
Libya hit back at the US condemnation, government spokesman Hassuna Shaush saying: "The United States has no right to speak of human rights."
Referring to the abuse of prisoners in a US-run jail in Iraq, Shaush said: "Before voicing an opinion on the Benghazi verdict, the United States would have done better to apologise for Abu Ghraib.
"The United States means that the death of more than 400 Libyan children is acceptable but the punishment of the guilty is unacceptable," he added.
"We did not want to politicise this matter, but the American reactions oblige us to reply."
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 programmes.
It also agreed to pay compensation to the families of those killed in two bombings, of a PanAm jumbo jet over Scotland in 1988 and a French airliner over the Niger desert in 1989, in attacks which were carried out by Libyan agents.
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