New York Times - November 5, 2006
Elisabeth Rosenthal

The nurses and doctor were foreign experts working at Al Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya, in 1998, when an outbreak of H.I.V. was detected at the hospital.

For years, Libyan authorities, including the country's leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, blamed the foreigners for the outbreak, suggesting that they had intentionally injected Libya's children with the virus. But a 2003 independent scientific report on the outbreak, by two of Europe's most prominent AIDS experts who spent many weeks in Libya reviewing the evidence, concluded that poor sanitary practices at the hospital were to blame.

Despite that report, which was commissioned by the Libyan government, the six have been in prison in Libya since their arrest in 1999, and they were sentenced to death in 2004.

A new trial was ordered after international protests.

In August, when the second trial started, prosecutors again requested the death penalty.

The expert report was not presented at the new trial, which is now close to conclusion. On Saturday, the judge said that the six would be sentenced on Dec. 19, Reuters reported.

The two experts, Dr. Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, and Dr. Vittorio Colizzi of Italy, said they had not been called to testify.

"We're concerned that the nurses and the doctor are being used as scapegoats for the problem of H.I.V. in Libya," said Dr. Ian Gilmore, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, who signed one of the letters. "We realized we had to mobilize - the case had slipped off the radar."

"You have to worry it's partly because they're from a less prominent country," he said. "If they had been British or American, the world would have woken up sooner."

This week, on the Web site of the journal Nature, 114 Nobel laureates signed an open letter to Colonel Qaddafi. By not allowing "independent scientific evidence" to be presented at the trial, the letter said, "a miscarriage of justice will take place without proper consideration of scientific evidence."

Dr. Richard J. Roberts, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, said he delivered the letter on Tuesday to Ambassador Attia Mubarak, the leader of the Libyan mission to the United Nations.

Last month, the leaders of Britain's most eminent scientific institutions, including the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, began a similar letter campaign.

In The Times of London, the scientists wrote: "We ask the medical and scientific authorities of the United Nations, Arab countries, United States and European Union (Bulgaria will join the E.U. in three months) to exert their utmost influence on President Qaddafi to prevent what might amount to judicial murder."

American and European politicians have frequently raised concerns about the medics' fate, but at the same time have gone on to develop closer relations with Libya.

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