Libya:A genetic analysis of the Aids virus in Libyan children appears to exonerate a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses accused of deliberately injecting 426 children with HIV at a Benghazi hospital in 1998, researchers reported yesterday.
The genetic history of the virus indicates that it is a common west African strain that was circulating in Libya long before the group's arrival, a British and Italian team reported in the journal Nature.
The findings contradict the Libyan government's claims that the children were infected with an exotic, perhaps man-made, form of the virus and that the country was the only African nation with no cases before the healthcare workers arrived in March 1998.
A verdict in the healthcare workers' second trial is expected on December 19th, and scientists hope the new results will lead to an acquittal.
The so-called Benghazi six - Palestinian Dr Ahmed Ashraf Al Hadjudi and Bulgarian nurses Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka and Kristiyana Valtcheva - have been imprisoned in Libya since 1999.
"The data is pretty clear that the infection in the hospital was obviously there before the Bulgarian health workers arrived," said viral geneticist David Hillis of the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.
The Libyan courts, however, have rejected previous scientific evidence suggesting that the HIV infections were the result of poor hospital hygiene.
There have been suggestions that Libya would free the workers if their governments were to pay "blood money" to the families of the children of about €4.1 billion.
The six were part of a larger group of volunteers who came to Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998 to help care for patients.
During the course of that year, 426 children at the hospital were diagnosed with Aids. At least 50 have died so far. The following year, 19 of the foreigners were arrested, but 13 were subsequently released.
They confessed to deliberately infecting the children but, according to Amnesty International, the confessions were obtained by torture. They were convicted and sentenced to death in 2004 but the convictions were later quashed.
- (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)