End of an ordeal and wave of relief

July.18 2007

End of an ordeal and wave of relief


THE DEAL that led to the commuting of death sentences handed down to five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting Libyan children with HIV into life terms has sent a wave of relief across the world.
The next step in the long drawn-out affair is expected to be the transfer from Libya to Bulgaria of the six under a prisoner transfer agreement signed between the two countries in the 1980s but never used before.
It might take some time before the formalities are completed and the five Bulgarian woman and the male Palestinian doctor Ñ who has been granted Bulgarian citizenship Ñ are sent to Bulgaria to serve out the remaining term. All six have been in Libyan detention since 1999, and were twice convicted of deliberately injecting 438 children Ñ 56 of them died Ñ in a Benghazi hospital with HIV-tainted blood. The death penalty had been confirmed for a third time by Libya's Supreme Court last week.
But Libya's top legal body, the Supreme Judicial Council, commuted the death sentences to life in prison on Tuesday after the families of the infected children received money under a compensation deal with the Qadhafi foundation.
The world kept a close watch on the proceedings, particularly that it was difficult to accept that six people had ganged up to infect hundreds of children with HIV as if part of a sinister plot against the people of Libya.
Experts suggested that the HIV infections started before the medics arrived at the hospital, and are more likely to have been a result of poor hygiene, a theory that was turned down during the trials of the six.
Indeed, we have heard the six allege that the confessions they signed were taken from them under duress and that they were innocent of any crimes. They also stood trial for slandering Libyan police for alleging that they were tortured while in custody.
Now their ordeal is coming to an end, and we could expect to hear more about what went behind the scenes once the six are out of Libya.
Libya acted wisely in accepting the compromise deal under which parents of the infected children will receive $1 million per child. Had Tripoli gone ahead with the death penalty, it would have been a huge black spot against Libya at a time when it is returning to the mainstream international diplomatic scene after more than 15 years of isolation in connection with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing case.
Few around the world failed to notice the similarity of sorts between the Lockerbie case and the HIV affair. Libya settled the Lockerbie case by accepting responsibility for the bombing and paying $10 million each to the 370 victims ÑÊ359 aboard the plane and nine on the ground. Many around the world read between the lines a Libyan determination to use the HIV case to implicitly highlight its "innocence" in the Lockerbie case notwithstanding the acceptance of responsibility. It was as if Libya was telling the world that if the six medics were innocent in the HIV case, then it was also true that Libya itself was innocent in the Lockerbie case.
All said and done, the affair is drawing to a relatively happy conclusion and the chapter would hopefully be closed when the six medics leave Libyan airspace under the transfer deal in the works.