San Francisco Chronicle - Wednesday, June 20, 2001
Matthew Brunwasser, Chronicle Foreign Service

A Libyan People's Court, which typically hears cases involving national security, pored over a 1,600-page indictment that charges the Bulgarians -- five nurses and a doctor -- with destabilizing the state. A final verdict is expected to be announced on Sept. 22 in Tripoli.

The prisoners have been held since February 1999, along with a Palestinian doctor. They also face charges of adultery, illegal foreign currency transactions and the production, distribution and use of alcohol. Nine Libyans face similar but lesser charges, including negligence. All are out on bail.

The Bulgarians have pleaded innocent. Two of the nurses, who had confessed in pretrial statements, said those statements were made under duress. Kristiyana Valcheva recently told BTA, Bulgaria's state news agency, that she was tortured with electric shocks, beaten and "submitted to every kind of torture known since the Middle Ages."

International and Bulgarian concern about the incredible charges were heightened in April when Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy shocked a high-profile AIDS conference in Nigeria by claiming that the infections were part of a Western plot. He said the CIA created the HIV virus, Western pharmaceutical companies profit from it and the Bulgarians gave it to Libyan children perhaps at the behest of U.S. or Israeli intelligence services.

"Who charged them with this odious task?" Khadafy said in remarks to the summit that were broadcast live on Libyan television and translated by the BBC Worldwide Monitoring Service. "Some said it was the CIA. Others said it was the Mossad (Israeli intelligence). They carried out an experiment on these children."

In his closing argument, the state prosecutor told the court: "They (Western intelligence agencies) want to prevent Libya from playing an important role in the Arab world. The killing of the children by this virus is a means by which these secret services achieve their ends."

Khadafy has also said that the Bulgarians will have "an international trial, like the Lockerbie trial." A Libyan intelligence officer is appealing his conviction in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 people on the plane and 11 others on the ground. Some observers suspect that Khadafy ordered the aircraft's bombing in revenge for a U.S. bombing raid on Libya in 1986 in which two of his sons were wounded and his 15-month-old adopted daughter was killed.

The analogy made with Lockerbie has led to suggestions that the Libyan leader is hoping to use the Bulgarians as a bargaining chip to secure the release of the intelligence officer convicted of the bombing.

And just last month, the Bulgarian newspaper Trud came up with yet another possible explanation for the trial -- a strong message for Khadafy's political foes. Trud cited unidentified Bulgarian intelligence sources who claimed that Libyan authorities had picked Benghazi as the location for the alleged scandal because it is a stronghold of political opposition.

Until the trial began on June 2, the Bulgarians had been allowed no contact with their families other than sporadic censored letters. The trial lasted three days after being delayed 13 times due to defense lawyers' requests for more information and time to prepare their case. The court allowed no witnesses and no AIDS experts to testify. Libyan officials declined an offer by World Health Organization officials to examine the hospital in Benghazi where the infections occurred.

"When I read the indictment, it didn't seem rational," said Krassimir Kanev, chairman of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee human rights group. "Deprivation of private and family life, lack of judicial independence, long detention, being held incommunicado are all problems that we can bring to the U.N. Human Rights Committee."

Moreover, the U.S.-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission says the court proceedings "appear to reflect unchecked and irrational anxieties about the violability of national boundaries and the foreign origins of HIV."

During the trial, the lawyer for the Bulgarians, Othmane al-Bizanthi, said his clients were innocent, arguing that the HIV injections were caused by "poor hygiene in the hospital, where syringes are used over and over again by the Libyan staff."

Dr. Luc Perrin, a virologist at the Geneva Medical Hospital, says he diagnosed many of the infected Libyan children who came to his clinic in Switzerland in 1998. He said that, in addition to HIV, about 40 percent of the blood samples he examined had hepatitis C, a rare condition in Libya.

"This is highly suggestive of reused syringes and poor medical practices," he said.

Bulgaria, along with other Soviet bloc nations, had close relations with Libya following Khadafy's rise to power in 1969. Many Bulgarian doctors and engineers still work in Libya to ease a shortage of professionals in the North African nation and earn much more than the average $100 a month back home. The Libyan Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, said about 6,000 Bulgarian workers in Libya will not be affected by the trial.

Nasia Dervishova, a Bulgarian nurse, came to Libya for the higher salary and was detained for questioning in the AIDS case and released a week later. She says foreign medical workers never treated patients without a Libyan colleague present.

But Libyan public anger about the sick children and poor medical services in general means someone needs to be held responsible, according to Mohamed Kasim, secretary general of the Netherlands-based Union of Libyan Human Rights Defenders.

"Foreign culprits make the most convenient scapegoat," he said.

Chronicle wire services contributed to this report.

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