LONDON, July 5 (AFP) - The parliamentary wing of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a pan-European security body, urged Libya on Monday not to execute six foreign medical workers convicted of infecting children with AIDS.
A resolution before OSCE parliamentarians said confessions had been extracted from the accused under torture by Libyan police and security services, and that two of the interrogators had admitted that duress had been applied.
Bruce George, president of the parliamentary assembly of the 55-member OSCE, said most people were convinced that the six -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor -- were wrongly convicted.
"I really hope that Colonel (Moamer) Kadhafi, the great leader, will step in and prevent the executions because most people including the medical profession say they are not guilty," he said in Scotland's capital Edinburgh.
"It would set back all that the Libyans have been trying to do in the last 12 months" to rebuild links with the West if the executions went ahead, said George, who also chairs the defence committee of Britain's House of Commons or lower house of parliament.
The six accused had been charged with premeditated murder and intentional infection of nearly 400 Libyan children with the AIDS virus through blood transfusion.
The death sentences were handed down in May, two months after British Prime Minister Tony Blair travelled to Libya to personally welcome Kadhafi back into the international fold.
Around 300 parliamentarians have been attending the Edinburgh conference, where the main theme is "Co-operation and Partnership: Coping with New Security Threats".
The OSCE, linking European, Central Asian and North American countries including Russia and the United States, has played a growing role in human and minority rights and conflict resolution.
It has gradually evolved into an intermediary European forum sharing concerns with the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, the older forum on social progress and democracy, and NATO, the western defence alliance's operational arm.
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