It's not as good as we might have hoped — it was commuted to a life sentence, rather than expulsion from Libya — but at least they aren't going to be executed. Effect Measure has the story.
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This is absolutely unacceptable. 6 medical workers are on trial in Libya under the accusation of infecting children with HIV, and if convicted they could be executed. While expert testimony and scientific evidence was presented at the trial, this evidence was thrown out from a combination of…
I've been a bit remiss about reporting an update on the Tripoli Six, six foreign health care workers who were falsely accused of intentionally infecting children at a hospital in Libya with HIV, leading to their being convicted and sentenced to death. The evidence against them was crap, and…
The case of the Tripoli 6 -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor now a Bulgarian citizen (for background see here) -- is in its final throes. It is not pretty. After a day's delay, word has come the Supreme Council has commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but with…
In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn't raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:
The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in…
The hope is that the commutation to life sentence will carry with it extradition to Bulgaria, where they can at last be freed. But it hasn't happened yet and this is a complicated situation fraught with danger.
Are the money winners all celebrating tonight?
Happy to have made millions by letting those people rot in jail for eight years?
Sickening.
Don't forget that in Africa, according to Christian missionaries it is the use of condoms that leads to HIV. Yay for Caucasian Jesus.
I missed this issue obviously; I have been treading water trying to catch up and find out. All I can find is that there is genetic evidence of innocence, but there must be more (not more concrete, but more expansive?). Why were the authorities so quick to defame these workers and not other avenues?
Been shaded up here in the north of Canada for a while...a link would be great.
I'm pleased to see an outcome that looks as if it will spare the lives of the 6, but I'm still furious every time I read anything about this story. It's just one more example where ignorant people with power corrupt the system and ignore solid scientific evidence that contradicts them.
We live in a very sad world.
OEJ
Monkey, the gist of it is that the AIDS infection started spreading before they arrived and continued spreading after they left. This was first found by checking the medical records of the hospital by several independent sources and later confirmed through genetic analysis. The particular strain involved is a particularly virulent hybrid strain found in West Africa (there are apparently immigrants from there in Libya), and there are no markers for genetic engineering. They were even able to trace the infection back to a single individual who visited the hospital a number of times, and apparently even to a particular group of visits. The physical evidence, the tools that they supposedly used to infect the people with HIV, is all conveniently missing.
@monkey
As for why authorities were so quick: Quite simply, admitting the true reason would mean admitting bad hygiene, which would mean that all is not as fine in Lybia as the great Ghaddafi tells his subjects. So to prevent the ire of the families targetting Ghaddafi, it was directed at foreigners, thereby giving Lybia a bargaining position to generate some profit even for the leadership.
I'm confident they'll be released eventually, but I'm sure there's a lot more behind the scenes diplomatic maneuvering before that happens. At least this stops the clock and allows that to happen.
But this stops the clock in more ways than one.
I too am confident that they will be released eventually, but more time in that dungeon? And when other children get "deliberately infected" by other victims (because Libya isn't going to clean up its medical act with all that money). I've gone from total depression to hope plus dark cynicism about all this.
Dark cynicism is always thoroughly justified about the ways in which sovereign states deal with one another (and the individuals who are caught in the middle). Even when it doesn't involve horrific loony bins like Libya, it's never pretty.