LIBYA - Dec 19 - Medical Workers Sentenced To Death In HIV Retrial In Libya.

A Libyan court again sentences five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to be shot by a firing squad for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV, more than 50 of whom have died. The decision complicates Libya's efforts to improve relations with the West. The verdict drew expressions of anger and alarm from Bulgaria and its supporters in the nearly eight-year-old case, which now appears likely to drag on for months, if not years, more. "We are going to urge the Libyan political leadership to engage in the process", the Bulgarian foreign minister, Ivailo Kalfin, said from Washington, where he met with State Sec Rice hours after the verdict was announced. Kalfin said his country was working through the Libyan Foreign Ministry to ask the nation's leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, and political institutions to intervene on the ground that an inefficient and biased judicial system had failed to deal with the case credibly. Lawyers for the medical workers said they would appeal to the Libyan Supreme Court. The case began in February 1998 when the nurses arrived to take up jobs at Al Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, the country's second-largest city. By August that year, children at the hospital began testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Health authorities soon realised they had a huge problem. An investigation concluded that the infections came from the wards where the Bulgarian nurses had been assigned. Dozens of Bulgarian medical workers were arrested, and a videotaped search of one nurse's apartment turned up vials of HIV-tainted blood. According to a Libyan intelligence report submitted to the court, that nurse, Kristiyana Vulcheva, later confessed that the vials had been given to her by a British friend who was working for the Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, at the time. She said she and her colleagues used the vials to infect the children. Qaddafi subsequently charged that the health care workers had acted on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad. A Benghazi court eventually convicted five nurses and a Palestinian doctor of deliberately injecting the children with the virus. But Vulcheva and another of the nurses said they were tortured into confessing, and international AIDS experts - including Luc Montagnier, the French virologist whose team discovered HIV - concluded that the virus predated the nurses' arrival and was probably spread by contaminated needles. The medical workers were sentenced to death in May 2004, beginning difficult negotiations between Libya, Bulgaria, the United States and the European Union to find a way out of the impasse. Finally, in December last year, the four negotiators announced that they were setting up an international fund to cover medical care and other costs incurred by the families of the HIV-infected children. The Libyan Supreme Court quashed the death sentences two days later and called for a retrial, this time by a court in the capital, Tripoli. The families have asked that Bulgaria or other donors provide $10m per child, the same amount that Libya agreed to pay each of the families of the 270 people killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, for which Libya has accepted responsibility. The families have said they would agree to release the nurses and doctor if their request was satisfied. Under Libyan law, victims' families have the power to grant clemency in return for compensation. But only a few million dollars in cash, services and equipment have been donated to the fund; some of that was used to treat the children in Europe this year. Talks over further donations stalled while the trial was under way, apparently because, the Libyan families say, Bulgaria hoped the new court would find the nurses not guilty. But on Dec 19, the presiding judge, Mahmoud Hawissa, read out the latest guilty verdict in a seven-minute hearing. The Bulgarian foreign minister and defense lawyers argue that this trial was equally flawed. "The whole court case was compromised and covers up the real cause that sparked the AIDS epidemics in Benghazi", said a joint statement by President Georgy Parvanov of Bulgaria and PM Sergey Stanishev. Emmanuel Altit, a French lawyer in Paris who worked on the defense team, said the court had refused to hear experts for the defense. The European Union justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, called on Libyan authorities to rethink their handling of the case, calling it "an obstacle to cooperation with the EU". Bulgaria will become a member of the bloc on Jan. 1. But for those Libyans who believe the nurses are guilty, the verdict was a foregone conclusion, even if their execution is not. Ramadan al-Faitore, whose 4-year- old stepsister was among the first to die, predicted earlier this month that the medical workers would be sentenced to death but not executed. "No one will kill the nurses", Faitore said in Paris, echoing a statement made by Qaddafi's son, Seif, two years ago. Faitore said the nurses' freedom would depend on donations to the international fund. "After the trial, negotiations will start again", he said. Kalfin, the Bulgarian FM, said that his country was committed to making sure that the fund would "provide lifelong medical treatment for the children and create conditions that would prevent this from ever happening again".