Deal Struck in Libya Foreign Medics Case

Left to right, Bulgarian nurses Snezhana Dimitrova, Cristiana Valcheva, Valya Chervenyashka, Palestinian doctor Ashraf Hajouj, and Bulgarian nurses Valentina Siropulo and Nasya Nenova await the verdict of their trial in a courtroom in Tripoli, Libya in this Dec. 19, 2006 file photo. A settlement has been reached in the case of the five nurses and doctor who have been sentenced to death in Libya for infecting 400 children with the AIDS virus, the spokesman for the country's Gadhafi foundation said Tuesday, July 10, 2007. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, file) (Ben Curtis - AP)

"We believe it is time for these people to be allowed to go home to their families," said Gonzalo Gallegos, a department spokesman.

The six began working at the hospital in the city of Benghazi in 1998 and were arrested the next year after more than 400 children there contracted HIV. Fifty of the children have died.

The prosecution insists that the six infected the children intentionally in experiments to find a cure for AIDS. Defense experts testified that the children were infected by unhygienic hospital conditions. In their testimony, the workers said the confessions used by the prosecution had been extracted under torture. Several of the nurses have said they were also raped to force confessions.

The medical workers were convicted and sentenced to death in 2004, but the Supreme Court ordered a retrial after an international outcry over the verdicts.

In a ruling that shocked many in Europe, the second trial ended with the same verdict in December despite a scientific report weeks earlier saying HIV was rampant in the hospital before the six began working there.

Two Libyans _ a police officer and a doctor _ were put on trial on charges of torturing them and were later acquitted _ which led to the six medics being put on a new trial for defamation.

They were acquitted of defamation in May, a ruling that raised hopes in Bulgaria that the main conviction and death sentences against them could be overturned by the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court upholds their conviction and death sentence on Wednesday, it is not necessarily the final word. When the December verdict was announced, Libya's foreign minister said a decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the sentence would go to a judicial board that could itself uphold or annul the decision.