TRIPOLI, 12 May 2006 — The retrial opened yesterday of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor held in jail since 1999 on charges of infecting Libyan children with AIDS, but adjourned for a month after the briefest of hearings.
The adjournment until June 13, marks the latest delay in the long-running case, which originally saw the six accused sentenced to death and then have the verdicts dramatically overturned in a Supreme Court ruling on Christmas Day.
Several European diplomats were in court along with all the accused, whose prolonged incarceration has been a subject of controversy at a time when Libya seeks to reintegrate with the international community after years in the cold.
“I am convinced of our innocence,” the Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Hajjuj, told AFP just before the retrial opened.
“We are the victims, just like all the children suffering” from AIDS. “I hope that this drama, in which we have found ourselves without reason, will come to an end.” As proceedings began, the nurses confirmed to the presiding judge that Othman Al-Bizanti remained their lawyer.
Presiding judge Mahmud Huwaissa said the trial was being adjourned for procedural reasons.
Prosecutors also rejected a request by Bizanti for the Bulgarians to be released on bail and the judge ordered the six to stay in detention ahead of the next hearing.
But Bizanti expressed optimism after the hearing. “It is a good start. The accused will get justice. What happened (today) was within the framework of the law.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to Bulgaria last month, said the nurses had spent “too long in captivity” and voiced hope they would soon be freed.
The nurses and the doctor were convicted on May 6, 2004 by a court in Benghazi, northeastern Libya, on charges of having knowingly injected at least 426 children with AIDS-contaminated blood at a local hospital.
Fifty-one of the children have since died.
Forty members of the victims’ families were protesting outside the court, brandishing placards and photos of the sick children and blocking the road. “It is a terrible crime,” they yelled.
In the search for a deal, Sofia and Tripoli have set up a fund to help fight AIDS in Libya and support the families of the infected children.
The fund is seen as a compromise between Libya’s demands for compensation and Bulgaria’s refusal to pay anything other than “humanitarian aid” on the basis that the nurses were innocent.
“All the sides are working to close this issue in a manner that is acceptable for both the parties. We hope that this affair will be definitively over before the end of the year,” said Salah Abdessalam, director of the Qaddafi foundation.
The spokesman for the families, Idriss Lagha, has said the sick children would be sent for treatment in French and Italian hospitals within the next two weeks.
Two hundred children would travel to hospitals in Paris and Marseille, and around the same number to Rome and Milan.
At their initial trial, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier, and Italian professor Vitorio Colizzi said the deadly disease had spread before the nurses’ arrival in Libya and was due to poor hygiene in the Benghazi hospital.
But the families have been demanding $10 million for each of the 426 contaminated children, according to Bulgarian television.
The figure would amount to the same compensation paid by Libya to the families of 270 victims of the Pan Am plane bombing over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in 1988.
