A Libyan court has sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for knowingly infecting hundreds of children with HIV in hospital in Libya. The verdict, reached on Tuesday, has been widely condemned by the international community.
The defendants burst into tears as the judge passed sentence, while the families of the children in the case started to celebrate what they termed “a just verdict”, singing and dancing outside the Tripoli court.
Defence lawyer Othman Bizanti told journalists that an appeal would be filed before Libya’s Supreme Court within the legal time-limit of 60 days, in the last recourse open to the medics.
The six accused had worked at Al-Fateh hospital in the coastal city of Benghazi, where it was alleged they had infected 426 children with HIV. All six pleaded not guilty, saying that they have been made scapegoats for unhygienic hospitals. Independent scientific analysis of the mutations in the viruses and other evidence supports their argument (see New evidence in Libyan HIV trial and Libya urged to free medical workers in AIDS retrial).
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They are expected to have the right of appeal to the Supreme Court for a second time. But that will be the last appeal allowed under Libyan law, defence lawyers said.
Shocking decision
EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini called for the decision to be reviewed. “I’m shocked by this decision,” he said, speaking outside the European parliament in Brussels, Belgium. “I strongly hope that the Libyan authorities will rethink this decision [which poses] an obstacle to cooperation with the EU.”
The medics have been held since 1999, during which time 52 of the 426 infected children have died of AIDS. The nurses and doctor were previously sentenced to face a firing squad in May 2004, but Libya’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.
Bulgaria’s parliamentary speaker urged Libya not to carry out the sentences. “We categorically and decisively reject the confirmation of the death sentences and express our deepest conviction that such verdicts cannot and must not be carried out,” Georgy Pirinski said.
The case has strained relations between Libya and the west as the north African state works its way back into the international fold after renouncing in 2003 its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Scientific evidence
Defence lawyers argued that the children had been infected with HIV before the nurses began working at the hospital.
In November 2006, British medical journal The Lancet blasted the retrial as a miscarriage of justice with “no legal foundation”. It cited independent scientific evidence that the infections were caused by bad hygiene at the Benghazi hospital, and reports from human rights watchdogs that confessions had been extracted under torture.
However, families of the infected children are pleased with the trial’s outcome. “I am happy with the verdict, which shows the impartiality of the Libyan justice system,” said Abullah Moghrabi, lawyer for the families.
Families of the dead children have demanded US$15 million in compensation for each lost youngster – a claim rejected by the Bulgarian government, which maintains that its nationals are innocent.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
