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Libya Reopens Bulgarian Nurses’ AIDS Trial
The retrial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of contaminating hundreds of Libyan children with AIDS reopened yesterday with the judge calling for the process to be speeded up. Judge Mahmoud Al-Huweissa adjourned the trial to June 20 after a brief session and said that in future any petitions would need to be filed in writing. “From now on we will have a weekly hearing because this case has dragged on too long,” he said.
Bulgaria welcomed the decision to pick up the pace. “The Libyan court’s declared intention to meet weekly on the case offers hopes that (the case) will be decided with the shortest possible delay,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev said. “We hope that the testimony of all the witnesses called by the defense and the arguments it will present will be reviewed with the maximum objectivity and taken into account in the court’s ruling,” he added.
While the nurses’ Libyan lawyer has been seeking their release on bail, a previous hearing on May 11 was adjourned for procedural reasons and the accused continue to be held in custody. The team of Bulgarian defense lawyers for the five nurses called for a new expert opinion on what caused the hospital AIDS outbreak, which infected the children as the two existing assessments were incompatible. Libyan experts said the outbreak was knowingly sparked by the nurses. But at their first trial, a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier, and Italian professor Vitorio Colizzi said the disease had spread before the nurses’ arrival in Libya and was due to poor hygiene in the Benghazi hospital.
One of the defense lawyers, Plamen Yalnazov, also asked the court to accept written testimony from Bulgarian engineer Smilian Tachev who was arrested together with the nurses but freed six months later. Tachev has told Trud newspaper in Bulgaria that the nurses were tortured in detention.
The Palestinian doctor on trial, Ashraf Hajjuj, for his part, has complained about the conditions in which he was being held, and also charged he was being discriminated against.
The nurses, meanwhile, were quoted as refusing to meet Bulgarian journalists in the Judeida prison. “We have been here for eight years now and we have no more to say. We have a lot to talk to you about in Sofia but we have nothing to say here,” said Kristiana
Valcheva.
Jailed since 1999, the nurses and the doctor were condemned to death in May 2004 at an initial trial in the eastern city of Benghazi. They were convicted of infecting 426 Libyan children with AIDS while working at the local hospital. The six, who proclaim their innocence, appealed to the Libyan Supreme Court which ordered a new trial last Dec. 25.-Agence France Presse.
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