TRIPOLI, 16 November 2005 — Libya yesterday again delayed making a ruling on whether five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor should be executed by firing squad for allegedly infecting about 400 children with the AIDS virus.
Supreme Court presiding judge Ali Al-Alus announced a decision had been put off to Jan. 31 in a case being closely watched by the international community as Muammar Qaddafi’s regime emerges from its past as a pariah state. “Death to the killers of children,” a crowd of some 300 relatives of the victims and their friends chanted outside the court. “The lives of our children are worth more than that of a Bulgarian woman.”
The judge said the delay was decided at the request of Libya’s prosecutor general, a move that was welcomed by the EU which has been lobbying intensively for the release of the six.
The medical workers, who have been in detention for six years, were sentenced to death in May 2004 for having knowingly injected with HIV-tainted blood 426 children in the Al-Fatah Children’s hospital in the Mediterranean town of Benghazi. At least 48 children have already died.
