Summary

NAME: FILE LIBYA VER 20061219I TAPE: EF06/1235 IN_TIME: 11:00:11:01 DURATION: 00:01:25:05 SOURCES: Libyan TV DATELINE: Tripoli, FIle RESTRICTIONS: No Access Libya SHOTLIST FILE - 15 May 2006 1 Wide of judges entering court 2 Wide of court room 3 Presiding judge naming defendants 4 Various of defendants 5 Zoom out to wide of judges leaving court 6 Zoom in from wide to mid of defendants with guards 7 People holding banner with photos of victims 8 Close up of photographs of children infected with HIV 9 Pan across relatives holding photos of children infected with HIV 10 Various of soldiers in front of the court 11 Pan along banner with photos of victims STORYLINE A Libyan court convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor of deliberately infecting 400 children with the HIV virus and condemned them all to death on Tuesday The accused reportedly did not react as the judgement was delivered They have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court The presiding judge, Mahmoud Hawissa, read out the verdict in a seven-minute hearing in a Tripoli court at the end of the defendants' second trial The six defendants, detained for nearly seven years, had previously been convicted and condemned to death, but Libyan judges granted them a retrial after international protests over the fairness of the proceedings Bulgaria contends the children were infected by unhygienic practices at their Libyan hospital An international legal observer of Lawyers Without Borders, promptly criticised the retrial for failing to admit enough scientific evidence Research published this month said samples from the infected children showed their viruses were contracted before the six defendants started working at the hospital in question The long trial of the six foreign medical workers has become a bone of contention in Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's efforts to rebuild ties with the West Europe and the United States have called for their release, indicating that future relations with Libya would be affected by Tuesday's verdict But Libyans strongly supported a conviction Some 50 relatives of the infected children - about 50 of whom have already died of AIDS - waited outside the court early on Tuesday morning, holding poster-sized pictures of their children and bearing placards that read Death for the children killers and HIV made in Bulgaria When the Supreme Court ordered a retrial in December 2005, friends and relatives rioted in Benghazi - the Libyan city where the children were infected in a state hospital Bulgarians will be aghast at Tuesday's verdict Hundreds of people staged peaceful protests in support of the five nurses in Bulgaria on Monday Europe, the United States and international rights groups have accused Libya of prosecuting the six foreign staff as scapegoats for dirty conditions at the Benghazi children's hospital Luc Montagnier - the French doctor who was a co-discoverer of HIV - testified in the first trial that the deadly virus was active in the hospital before the Bulgarian nurses began their contracts there in 1998 More evidence for that argument surfaced on December 6th - too late to be submitted in court - when Nature magazine published an analysis of HIV and hepatitis virus samples from the children Using changes in the genetic information of HIV over time as a molecular clock, the analysts concluded that the virus was contracted before the six defendants arrived at the hospital - perhaps even three years before Idriss Lagha, the president of a group representing the victims, rejected the Nature article, telling a press conference in London on Monday that the nurses had infected the children with a genetically engineered virus He accused them as doing so for research on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies