KEY POINTS:
ROME - A Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses will learn today whether they must die by firing squad in Libya for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with the HIV virus.
Fifty-two of the children have since died of Aids. The surviving 374 are being treated as outpatients at hospitals in France and Italy, at the expense of Libya's dictator, Muammar Ghadaffi.
Ramadan Faitori, a spokesman for the families of the children, said: "We are fully confident that the accused group is criminal and will be convicted."
The foreign medical staff were first convicted of the crime and sentenced to die in 2004, but Libya's Supreme Court ordered a retrial. Official media in Libya are declaring that the guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion. The accused have been held in jail in Libya since March 1999.
But foreign experts are united in believing that the six have been made scapegoats for a crime they did not commit.
Reports by top Aids experts, including one by one of the discoverers of Aids, Professor Luc Montagnier of France, have exonerated them.
Montagnier said the epidemic was probably caused by poor hygiene in the hospital, and pointed out that the epidemic had begun before the six started working in the hospital and continued after their arrests.
A new report published last week in Nature by a team led by British evolutionary biologist Oliver Pybus, who studied Libyan children under treatment at Bambinu Gesu Hospital in Rome, also concluded that the epidemic began before the foreign staff arrived. The report also identified a likely source.
"The virus is of a kind found in West Africa which makes sense as Libya has a large population of guest workers from there," Pybus wrote.
The case has put a crimp in Libya's relations with the West.
In 2003 Ghadaffi renounced his nuclear and other programmes for weapons of mass destruction. Libya and the United States have since resumed full diplomatic relations, and Ghadaffi has been received with honour by the leaders of the European Union in Europe. But the trial has become a test case of Libya's ability and willingness to become a trustworthy partner of the West.
It has also become a political headache for Ghadaffi as Benghazi, where the contamination of blood supplies took place, is a hotbed of opposition to his authoritarian rule.
The case against the foreigners appears to have become a surrogate way of expressing hostility to the Ghadaffi regime. This year Libya offered a way out of the fix: Bulgaria should pay the children's families the sum of US$2.7 billion ($3.9 million), the same amount paid by Libya in compensation for the Lockerbie bomb. Sofia turned the proposal down flat.
The six have claimed that they were tortured in custody, but Libyan police and a doctor whom they blamed for the attacks were acquitted in trials that finished last year.
US Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, who helped negotiate the resumption of diplomatic relations between Libya and the US, arrived in Tripoli at the weekend to discuss "issues which hinder improvements in relations", according to the Libyan news agency Jana. Welch has previously called for the nurses to be allowed to go home.
Of the five nurses, the health of Snezhana Dimitrova is reported to be the most fragile. She suffered a nervous breakdown last year and broke her leg this year. She maintains it is inconceivable that a nurse and a mother could commit the crime of which she is accused.
- INDEPENDENT
