San Francisco Chronicle - April 1, 2007
Dan Morrison, Chronicle Foreign Service

The couple's pneumonia-stricken 4-month-old son, Milad, had been moved to a separate room. Nurses had started wearing rubber gloves.

"They said they were testing them for a virus, something called HIV," recalled Jarbou, an English teacher. "I said, 'What's HIV?' "

Soon he learned the terrible truth. Milad was among 438 children infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, during treatment at Al-Fateh. It was the biggest hospital-borne HIV outbreak in history. Twenty mothers also were infected while nursing their HIV-positive infants. Fifty-seven children -- including Milad, in 1999 -- have died so far.

"It was a death sentence for the children, and it was social death for the families," Jarbou said. "This is a conservative society. AIDS means drugs, prostitution, homosexuality."

But the Benghazi outbreak isn't just a local catastrophe -- it's an international incident, with charges of mass murder, conspiracy, torture and bad science.

In December, after eight years in prison and two trials, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death for purposely infecting the children of Benghazi -- part of a plot, Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy has said, by U.S. or Israeli spies.

The medics are now on trial again, this time for slander, after accusing their captors of torture. Libyan police officials have described the trial -- which last week was postponed until April 22 to give the defense more time to prepare -- as necessary to restore their honor after the torture allegations.

The medical workers face up to six years in prison if convicted.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bulgaria are considering charges against the Libyan officers, a move that analysts said would harm the medics' bid for freedom.

And the children of Benghazi keep dying.

Before the Benghazi outbreak, Libya was officially free of HIV. The epidemic soon became a criminal matter. In late 1998, police Col. Juma Mishri was assigned to help crack the strange epidemic. He found a web of evil, with an unlikely spider at its center: Bulgarian nurse Kristiana Valcheva.

Valcheva, Mishri said, paid the other foreigners to infect the children. "It was very difficult to believe a nurse would do something like this," he said, adding that she had freely confessed.

Among the evidence were bottles of HIV-tainted plasma that Mishri says he found in Valcheva's home, confessions by two of the nurses and a report by Libyan scientists suggesting "deliberate transmission of HIV to the infected children."

There was also deep moral suspicion, including early charges of illicit sex and drinking. Mishri pulled from his briefcase snapshots of Valcheva dancing at parties in her home. A parent of one infected child produced a cell-phone camera image of Valcheva nude on a Libyan beach.

The nurses recanted their confessions, saying their statements had been coerced.

Mishri denied that police used torture. "They confessed because they were guilty," he said.

They confessed, Valcheva told Bulgarian radio, to stop the torture. "My body was covered with black-and-blue hematomas, blood and lymph were flowing from my feet," she said. "But the beatings paled in comparison to the electric shocks."

"You should be ashamed of your crimes," Ashraf Juma, the jailed Palestinian doctor, yelled at Mishri during a recent hearing. "You tortured us."

Supporters of the nurses complain that extensive medical evidence was ignored by trial judges, who blocked independent tests of the plasma bottles. The court commissioned, and then rejected, a report by French scientist Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, and Italian immunologist Vittorio Colizzi after their findings cleared the foreigners.

A team from the World Health Organization visiting Al-Fateh in 1998 found the outbreak was probably caused by the use of unsterilized equipment, a common problem in the developing world. They weren't allowed back.

Later studies, including a recent genetic analysis of dozens of blood samples from dozens of victims by the British journal Nature, also blamed the hospital. The Benghazi strain of HIV, the Nature report said, had its origins in West Africa. The outbreak started before the medics even arrived in Libya, and was likely caused by poor hygiene.

"From a scientific point of view, everything is clear," said Colizzi. "It is a political matter."

Luc Perrin, a Swiss AIDS researcher who also analyzed dozens of blood samples from the infected children, said the nurses and the doctor were scapegoats. "It cannot be their hospital's fault, the fault of their system," he said of the Libyan authorities. "It must be these foreigners."

Human rights groups, the European Union and more than 100 Nobel laureates have called for the medics to be freed, appeals the Libyan victims find insulting.

"It's like it's we who infected them, not the other way around," said 22-year-old Rhouma Hassan Rhouma, who acquired HIV at 13 and is currently taking anti-retroviral drugs.

Ostracized and desperate, the parents formed the Family Association of HIV/AIDS Children of Benghazi. It became a political force, imbued with grief and martyrdom. The fact that the Benghazi strain of HIV hadn't been seen before the outbreak is irrefutable evidence of the foreigners' guilt. "This proves it was created in a lab," said the group's founder, Idriss Laga, whose 9-year-old daughter was infected as an infant.

The families are bewildered by the breadth of support for the medics, and some have turned to the shadows for answers.

Only one force, Laga said, had the power to infect the children and then make heroes of their killers: the Freemasons. "The Masons are behind this crime," he said. "I was blind until now. These thoughts give me light through the tunnel."

A former resident of Benghazi, who asked not to be identified for fear of official retaliation, tried to explain. "These people are very hurt," he said. "No one was prepared for this, not the people and not the government."

Nine years after the epidemic began, oil-rich Libya still doesn't have adequate AIDS treatment facilities; many of the children are undergoing treatment in Europe.

Despite the raw emotions, many believe Khadafy -- who is trying to open Libya to foreign capital and expertise -- will eventually free the six medical workers.

Libya has offered clemency in exchange for $10 million for each victim, the same amount Libya agreed to pay for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Bulgaria has refused. Khadafy has also suggested trading the medical workers for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent serving a life sentence in Scotland for the Pan Am bombing. Most Libyans believe al-Megrahi, whose tribe has a strong presence in Benghazi, is an innocent held unjustly in a foreign prison. Britain has rejected the idea.

"The families are a potent force from a neglected quarter," said a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the case. "Khadafy has to salvage Libya's self-respect. Linking this to Lockerbie is a way to do that."

Jarbou, the English teacher, was uncomfortable comparing the cases. "Our dignity is above everything," he said. "Our blood will not come cheap."

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