March 29
BULGARIA/LIBYA:
Bulgarian nurses appeal death penalty in Libya AIDS case
A Libyan court is set to hear on Tuesday an appeal by 5 Bulgarian nurses
and a Palestinian doctor who face the death penalty for allegedly
infecting children with the AIDS virus.
The case has provoked tensions between Libya and Bulgaria, whose Foreign
Minister Solomon Passy raised the issue with US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
However, Bulgarian Prime Minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg said Friday: "The
less we speak of it and the less we try to politicise the process, the
better their chances are."
The 6 health workers were sentenced to death in March last year for
infecting 380 children with the HIV virus through contaminated blood at a
hospital in Benghazi on Libyas Mediterranean coast.
The defendants, who have already spent 6 years in jail, all maintain their
innocence. 2 nurses and the doctor initially confessed to the charges but
later claimed police extracted their confessions with torture including
beatings and electric shocks.
47 children at the pediatric hospital have died of the disease, but the
Benghazi court that condemned the health workers to death rejected
testimony from Luc Montaignier, the French doctor who first isolated the
HIV virus, and Swiss and Italian colleagues, that the epidemic was due to
a lack of hygiene.
Instead the court based its verdict on a report by Libyan experts that
placed the blame on the foreign health workers.
The Bulgarian press said the six were made "scapegoats" in a bid to calm
the public outrage that the epidemic has provoked in Libya.
Fears for the fate of the nurses rose further last week when Libyan leader
Moammer Kadhafi, during an Arab League summit, criticised Western attempts
to win their release.
"The Bulgarians have killed our children. I swear by Allah that some
Western officials come to me and say, "We want to take them (the nurses)
back today, so release them,'" Kadhafi said in Algiers.
"We told them that the day the court sentenced the nurses to death,
demonstrations in support (of their death sentence) were held in Benghazi.
The West told us, the opinions of your people do not interest us, our
people are sheep and that we have no public opinion."
On Thursday, however, Kadhafi followed up his remarks with an invitation
to Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov to visit Libya.
Tripoli has said that in exchange for the freedom of the nurses, it wants
compensation equal to that paid by Libya to relatives of the victims of
the Lockerbie plane bombing carried out by its secret service in 1988.
But Bulgarian authorities have rejected the demand, saying that giving in
would amount to acknowledging the guilt of the 6.
One of the defence lawyers, Egyptian Amin al-Dib, has said he was
"absolutely sure" that the Libyan Supreme Court in Tripoli would not
confirm the death sentence but would call for a new jury to re-examine the
evidence.
"There is not the faintest proof that these 5 women committed the crime of
which they have been accused," he told a Bulgarian newspaper.
(source: Agence France Presse)
INDIA:
Rape case: Man faces death sentence
A sessions court today handed down death sentence to a man for raping and
murdering a 11-year-old girl in Coochbehar district 6 years back.
Additional Session Judge Somnath Banerjee awarded capital punishment to
Nepal Mandal for raping and then strangulating Namita Das on May 13, 1999.
According to the prosecution, Mandal called the girl for helping him pluck
mangoes from a tree in Paschim Rampur village.
Her body was later found inside a bush near a railway track. The doctors
at a primary health centre declared her dead and ascribed the cause of her
death to asphyxia.
The vaginal swab of the girl was sent for examination to the Regional
Forensic Scientific Laboratory in Jalpaiguri where the rape was confirmed.
A total of 17 witnesses were examined in the case.
(source: PTI)
