Gaddafi suggests spy link in HIV case

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Friday defended a court's decision to sentence five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for infecting more than 400 children with HIV, but said mystery surrounded the case.

"It is unimportant that the medics are sentenced to death or not - if they committed a crime and are sentenced to death, that is the court's decision," Gaddafi told a gathering of officials, religious leaders and reporters in Tripoli.

"The important thing is why the medical team injected the children with AIDS. Who ordered you - was it Libyan intelligence, American intelligence, Israeli intelligence or Bulgarian intelligence? This is what we have to find out."

The medics were sentenced last week for deliberately infecting the children with the virus that causes AIDS at a Benghazi hospital in the late 1990s.

More than 50 of the children have since died. Condemnation poured in from Western governments and rights groups, with Bulgaria, the EU which it joins next month and Amnesty International among the swiftest critics. Washington said it was disappointed.

Some Western scientists say negligence and poor hospital hygiene are the real culprits and the six are scapegoats, but in Libya the verdict came as a welcome act of defiance of the West. On Thursday, Libya's Foreign Ministry said western criticism of the death sentences showed a lack of respect for Libya.

It defended the ruling and said outside pressure to overturn the sentences created a dangerous precedent in which Libyans are considered "sub-human" and treated differently to Bulgarians.

Gaddafi contrasted the international outcry over the HIV case with that of Libyan Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, who was found guilty in 2001 of the Pan Am plane bombing over Scotland and handed a mandatory life prison sentence. Tripoli has agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of the crash victims and taken responsibility for the bombing.

A Palestinian woman died of an AIDS-related illness at a Libyan hospital yesterday, taking to 57 the number of victims of an HIV outbreak in the late 1990s blamed on six foreign medics, a local support group said.

Maha Mahmood Shams, 18, died in hospital in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, one-and-a-half years after her brother died from AIDS, said Idriss Naga, chairman of the Association for Libyan HIV-Infected Children. Both were among 426 children who contracted HIV while they were patients at a hospital in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Of eight Palestinians infected, Shams was the fifth to die, Naga said.