Bulgarian nurses face new verdict in Libya HIV trial today

Snezhana Dimitrova, 54, said her Libyan jailors hung her from a doorway by her arms, hands tied behind her back until her shoulders came out of their sockets.

Nasya Nenova, now 40, tried to kill herself in prison after she says she was tortured into confessing to deliberately injecting children with the deadly HIV virus while working as a nurse in Libya in 1998.

"I attempted suicide not because of a guilty conscience, but because I could not stand more electric shocks," she was quoted by Bulgarian media as telling a Libyan court in 2001.

Libya jailed Ms Dimitrova, Ms Nenova and four other foreign medics in 1999 and charged them with infecting 426 children with the virus that causes AIDS.

Although both retracted their confessions, the nurses were found guilty along with three other Bulgarians and a Palestinian doctor, and were sentenced to death by firing squad.

They escaped that punishment when a higher court quashed the sentences and ordered a retrial a year ago.

But now they face a second sentencing today and could be condemned to death once again, a possibility their families in Bulgaria can hardly fathom.

"How can people even speak of death sentences?" Polina Dimitrova, daughter to Snezhana, said. "We have innocent people here. I can't even let myself think about it."

The immediate fate of the medics is in the hands of a Libyan court but their longer term prospects are even less clear. They are hostage to a larger geo-political drama.

The United States and the European Union, which Bulgaria joins on January 1, say Libya must release the medics because of evidence of torture and studies showing the epidemic started before the nurses arrived at the Benghazi children's hospital.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has reason to free them. The case has hampered Tripoli's slow process of rapprochement with the West, which moved up a gear when it abandoned its pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in 2003.

But analysts say freeing them would put the spotlight on Libya's medical system - which western scientists point to as the real culprit for the HIV epidemic - and could stoke domestic unrest in Benghazi, a hotbed of dissent.

Colonel Gaddafi is therefore thought likely to keep the medics as a bargaining chip until talks yield a financial payout from the international community to appease the families of the infected children, a leading Libya analyst said.

"I think the nurses are going to be found guilty and Colonel Gaddafi will exercise clemency only after a deal on compensation," said George Joffe, who lectures on the Middle East and North Africa at Cambridge University's Centre for International Studies.

"But the big loser here will be the Palestinian (Ashraf Alhajouj). He will be forgotten." Mr Joffe said without backing from Western powers, he was more likely to be executed.

Last month, 114 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to Colonel Gaddafi complaining critical evidence had been dismissed by prosecutors, including some that showed the outbreak was caused by the re-use of syringes and poor hygiene in the hospital.

That was followed by an academic paper in the science magazine Nature which found the genetic origin of HIV and Hepatitis C viruses infecting the children at the hospital were present long before the nurses arrived there in March 1998.

"The scientific community has done its part. It has given strong evidence. Now it's up to the political community," said Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome's Tor Vergata University and co-author of the study. Mr Joffe said there was unwillingness in the West to take too hard a line against Libya for fear of endangering contracts to exploit Libya's huge oil reserves and alienating a potential ally against Islamic extremists.

In Benghazi, where more than 50 of the infected children have died, most people have seen a member of their extended family touched by the tragedy. There is uncompromising public anger against the nurses and international efforts to free them.

"Anyone who doubts the justice of this case has a role in the crime," Alfajer Al-jaded newspaper wrote in an editorial.

Tripoli has demanded €10 million for each infected child's family - "blood money" under which Islamic law lets victims' relatives withdraw death sentences in return for reparations.

Bulgaria and its allies have rejected the idea, saying any payout would be an admission of guilt.

But, led by Brussels, they are trying to arrange a fund of medical aid, living expenses, training and treatment at European hospitals for the children and their families.

Analysts say that will take time, possibly more than a year - frustrating for those waiting for the return of their wives, mothers and daughters in Bulgaria.

"For almost eight years Libya has come up with clever excuses to keep them behind bars," Zorka Anachkova, mother of accused nurse Christiana Valcheva, said. "They will make something up again so they can keep blackmailing the world."

Factbox - Profiles of foreign medics in Libyan HIV case

Today, a Libyan court will deliver verdicts for five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with the HIV virus in a Benghazi hospital.

Bulgaria's allies, the United States and the European Union, say they are innocent, citing evidence they were tortured to confess and the epidemic began before they worked at the clinic.

Following are profiles of the accused who have been jailed in Libya since 1999:

• Snezhana Dimitrova, 54: Of the five nurses, Ms Dimitrova's health is most fragile. Formerly a nurse in Sofia, she suffered a nervous breakdown in 2005 and broke her leg this autumn.

Ms Dimitrova, jailed six months after her arrival at the Al-Fateh hospital in 1998, says it is inconceivable that a nurse and a mother could commit the crime of which she is accused. She has a daughter, Polina, who is now 26 and a son Ivailo, 33.

• Valia Cherveniashka, 51: Ms Cherveniashka, a nurse from the small northwest Bulgarian town of Biala Slatina, began working in Benghazi in February 1998. She says she was beaten by Libyan guards but did not confess to infecting the children.

Her husband, Emil Uzunov, staged a hunger strike in 2003 at the Libyan embassy. He and Ms Cherveniashka's two daughters, 28 and 29, have criticised Sofia's handling of the case, saying dozens of nationals from Poland, Thailand and other countries were also arrested but later released.

• Nasya Nenova, 40: A nurse for five years in the eastern Bulgarian town of Sliven, she travelled to work in Libya in February 1998 and was jailed around a year later.

She tried to kill herself after she said she was tortured with electric shocks. She has a son Radoslav, 19, who was in secondary school when she was arrested and is now in university.

• Christiana Valcheva, 47: Ms Valcheva worked six years in Sofia hospitals as a nurse before travelling to Benghazi in 1998. Libyan prosecutors say she is the mastermind behind the case, basing their evidence on blood bags found in her house in Libya, although she never worked in the children's hospital itself.

"With God as my witness, I am innocent," she told the court in the last trial, when her husband Zdravko Georgiev was acquitted of infecting children. She has a 29-year-old son.

• Valentina Seropoulo, 47: A nurse for 18 years in the town of Pazardzhik before travelling to Libya in February 1998, Ms Siropoulo, who is married, says she is innocent and she showed compassion to the children in the AIDS ward where she worked.

She said beatings and torture with electric shocks left her with partial paralysis to her face and unable to talk for months. She has a 26-year-old son.

• Ashraf Alhajouj: A Palestinian doctor in his late 30s who has lived most of his life in Libya, he strongly protests his innocence and says the charges have been fabricated by the police. He was born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 1969 and came to Libya when he was two years old. Educated and trained in Libya, he has said it is inconceivable he could harm Libyan children.