Libyan Court Condemns Bulgarian Nurses

Bulgarian nurse Snezhana Dimitrova, who appeared to have a problem with her lower left leg, sits in the caged dock at the trial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor in Tripoli, Libya Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006. A Libyan court on Tuesday convicted the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor of deliberately infecting 400 children with the HIV virus and condemned them to death, provoking shouts of approval from the children's relatives - but Bulgaria swiftly condemned the decision and reiterated its belief that the children were infected by unhygienic conditions in their Benghazi hospital. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis) (Ben Curtis - AP)

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, reiterated allegations the women has been mistreated while in prison.

"They have been beaten. They have also been sexually abused during their imprisonment," Sirkin told The Associated Press. "This is based on interviews and field evaluations."

Sirkin said she doesn't think the nurses have been abused since 2004, however, because they have been visited by international observers and Bulgarian officials and because of the case's high profile.

"The greatest concern now is with their mental state," Sirkin said. "They're removed from their families, under a sentence of death, twice now."

The case has been deeply politicized from the start. International anger over the prosecution has hampered _ though not halted _ Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's efforts to end his pariah status with the West.

Over the summer, the United States restored ties with Libya, cut since 1980, and removed it from its terror list after Gadhafi renounced weapons of mass destruction and reached a compensation deal for victims of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland. The U.S. quietly reopened its embassy in Tripoli, but Rice has balked at visiting Libya.

Gadhafi's government faced intense popular pressure for a guilty verdict. Clashes broke out in Benghazi when the Supreme Court ordered a retrial in December. Libya's second-largest city, Benghazi has been a center for anti-Gadhafi Islamic fundamentalist groups and an innocent verdict could have fueled opposition to the government _ particularly if conditions at the hospital were blamed for the infections.

Some 50 relatives of the infected children demonstrated outside court Tuesday, holding poster-sized pictures of their children and bearing placards that read "Death for the children killers" and "HIV made in Bulgaria."

Inside, the defendants sat stony-faced and showed no reaction as the judge delivered the verdict.

In Bulgaria, President Georgi Parvanov and Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev called the ruling "absurd" and urged Libyan authorities "to intervene immediately" to reconsider it and free the medics.

The case was sent immediately to the Libyan Supreme Court for appeal, but it was not known when the court would rule. If it upholds the ruling, the case goes to the Judicial Board, which can uphold or annul it, Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam said.

An international legal observer, Francois Cantier of Lawyers Without Borders, criticized the retrial for failing to admit enough scientific evidence. "We need scientific evidence. It is a medical issue, not only a judicial one," he said.

Luc Montagnier _ the French doctor who was a co-discoverer of HIV _ testified in the first trial that the HIV virus was active in the hospital before the Bulgarian nurses began their contracts there in 1998.

More evidence for that argument surfaced on Dec. 6 _ too late to be submitted in court _ when Nature magazine published the analysis of HIV and hepatitis virus samples from the children.

Using changes in the genetic information of HIV over time as a "molecular clock," the analysts concluded the virus was contracted as much as three years before the defendants arrived at the hospital.