The New York Times - August 29, 2006
Craig S. Smith

"The evidence has been established, and after the confessions of the accused and the witness statements, I am calling for the most extreme penalty, which is the death penalty," the Libyan prosecutor told the court, according to Agence France-Presse, before the trial was adjourned to next Tuesday.

The retrial, which began May 11, has heard only from prosecution witnesses so far. A verdict in the case is expected next month.

The complex legal action is one of the final kinks left in Libya's once-tangled relations with the West. The country has sought in recent years to abandon its anti-Western policies, give up its nuclear weapons program and pay compensation to past victims of its terrorist attacks. As a result, the State Department removed Libya from its list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

But the country's leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has argued that he cannot intervene in the medical workers' case, because that would interfere with the independence of Libya's justice system.

The medical workers were jailed in 1999 and later convicted of infecting 426 children with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. More than 50 of those children have died. Two of the nurses reportedly confessed during earlier police interrogations, but later testified in court that they had done so under torture. All six defendants say they are innocent.

In 2004, the medical workers were sentenced to death by firing squad, but the Supreme Court overturned their convictions last December and sent the case back to a lower court.

Bulgaria has rejected Libya's offer to release the nurses in return for millions of dollars in "blood money" for the families of the infected children. Last year, the European Union, the United States and Britain helped establish a fund that now holds millions of dollars to pay for the children's medical care.

All six defendants were in court on Tuesday, and they heard testimony from a young girl who was among those infected, the French news agency reported. The girl said one of the nurses "forcibly administered an injection" without saying what the injection was.

The original trial and the retrial have pitted international specialists, including Luc Montagnier, a French researcher and a co-discoverer of H.I.V., against the Libyan medical authorities. The international experts say that the virus was already circulating in the hospital and that it was unintentionally passed on to the children because of lax sanitary practices. The Libyans say that the virus was deliberately introduced to the hospital.

The court has repeatedly refused defense requests for bail, citing insufficient guarantees.

The Bulgarian authorities have said that if the nurses are again found guilty and sentenced to death, they will ask Libya to commute their sentences to life imprisonment and allow them to serve their sentences in Bulgaria. It is not clear who would intervene on behalf of the Palestinian doctor.

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