Aids Trial Tests Libya's Commitment to Reform

The trial in Libya of seven foreign medical workers accused of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV entered its final stage today, as the prosecution and defence presented their final submissions.

Six Bulgarians and one Palestinian are charged with knowingly spreading HIV at a children's hospital in the port city of Benghazi. Prosecution lawyers have asked for the death penalty, but all seven deny the charges. Under Libyan law, a verdict must be reached within 30 days of the end of the trial.

Internationally-renowned Aids experts have put the blame for the April 1997 to March 1999 outbreak on poor hygiene at the hospital, and defence lawyers have raised serious concerns about the conduct of the investigation, including allegations of confessions extracted under torture.

Two of the female defendants have also claimed that they were sexually abused in police custody.

The trial has come to be seen in diplomatic circles as a barometer of how far the Libyan president, Muammar Gadafy, is prepared to progress on human rights as he attempts to re-integrate his country with the west.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said last week that Britain was encouraging Libya to move forward in the area of human rights when he met his Libyan counterpart, Mohammed Abdulrahman Shalgam, for "milestone" talks in London.

The prime minister, Tony Blair, has agreed to meet Col Gadafy if Libya makes progress on solving the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and other bilateral issues.

The medical workers - five Bulgarian nurses and two doctors, a Bulgarian and a Palestinian - were arrested in February 1999 after 393 children at the al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi were found to have HIV, the virus which causes Aids.

They were held by the police between 1999 and 2002 while the case was investigated. Their defence lawyers say they were tortured. They are currently under house arrest at Quefia jail in Benghazi.

Nurse Kristiyana Vulcheva said in a 2001 hearing that she had been given electric shocks, beaten and "subjected to the kinds of torture known since the middle ages". Palestinian Ashraf al-Hadjudj said he was tortured before and after making a videotaped confession that took three takes to film.

Torture is reportedly routine in the Libyan prison system, according to Amnesty International's latest report on the country.

The case against the medical workers rests largely on a rejection of evidence from Professor Luc Montagnier, the French Aids expert who first identified HIV. Prof Montagnier told the trial that poor hygiene and the reuse of infected medical materials such as needles was the most likely cause of the infection.

He said that analysis of blood samples came out "strongly against" the possibility that the disease had spread through deliberate infection.

It also emerged in the trial that two of the accused did not work in the hospital. But the case is emotive in Libya, where it is seen less as an indication of how far Col Gadafy will go to boost his standing with the west than the trial of seven people accused of infecting 393 children with the HIV virus.

At least 48 children have died and some have gone on to infect their families.

Until 2002, the case was heard in a national security court when a charge that the Bulgarians had entered into a conspiracy to experiment on Libyan children and destabilise the state was dropped. It then moved to an ordinary criminal court.

The European Union, which is expected to admit Bulgaria in a second wave of expansion into eastern Europe in 2006, has called for all remaining charges to be dropped.