Tripoli 6
revere | January 14, 2009Last week we alerted you to a gross miscarriage of justice involving two doctors in Iran. Many of you responded by calling the Mission of Iran at the UN and signing a petition. I wish I could report good news in this update, but so far what we have heard is not encouraging. From an email from Physicians for Human Rights USA:
I wanted to send you an urgent update on the case of Drs Kamiar and Arash Alaei. We still do not have a verdict in the case, but have released a press statement this evening in response to reports out of Iran today that are very troubling. A spokesperson for the Iranian…
revere | July 24, 2007At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov. Our six medical colleague had been accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and sentenced to death. They have been imprisoned for 8 years, through two trials and numerous appeals. Genetic analysis of the infecting…
revere | July 18, 2007Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 have become a cause celebre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the…
revere | July 17, 2007The 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 extradition to Bulgaria. We await details and no one with experience in this sad case will breathe easy until the six are on Bulgarian soil.
However this case comes out, scientists and science journalists played a very significant role in its evolution. Nature magazine, now the world's most prestigious and…
revere | July 11, 2007The final act in the drama of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor imprisoned for seven years and sentenced to death by firing squad in Libya after being accused of deliberately infecting over 400 chidren with HIV in a children's hospital in Bengazi (see posts here) is now being played out in the Libyan capital of Tripoli:
Libya's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld death sentences on six foreign medics for infecting Libyan children with HIV, a ruling that paves the way for moves by Muammar Gaddafi's government to win their freedom.
Experts said the ruling completed the role of the…
revere | June 20, 2007As Declan Butler reports on his blog, the Tripoli 6 case is reaching its final phase. To summarize briefly, The Tripoli 6 are five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who have been imprisoned in Libya for 7 years and then condemned to death by firing squad on charges they deliberately infected some four hundred or more children with HIV in the hospital in Bengazi. Scientific work later demonstrated they could not have been the source of the infection. You can find previous posts we did on this here. On December 19 a new trial, called as a result of an appeal to the Libyan Supreme…
revere | June 7, 2007We need to celebrate our victories, small as some are. I learned from my SciBling, Grrl, over at Living the Scientific Life that Elsevier is abandoning their ill gotten gains as enablers of international arms merchants, a role we and many others posted on. Her summary is excellent. Here's some more detail:
As first reported by The Scientist, the Anglo-Dutch publishing behemoth, which puts out more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 books annually, has bowed to pressure from leading scientists and will no longer organize trade shows for weapons merchants.
Despite the profitability of the company's…
revere | April 10, 2007Soon, maybe as soon as the end of the month, the Libyan Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor, the "Tripoli 6" (here, here, here, here, here and here). As it approaches there is intense activity from the international scientific community. On March 23, ten major medical associations wrote to Colonel Qadhafi:
We the undersigned leading health professional associations in the United States are writing to urge you in the strongest terms to immediately release and exonerate the five Bulgarian nurses--Valya Cherveny, Snezhanka Dimitrova, Nasya…
revere | January 2, 20072006, like other years, was a year of revenge killings. Iraq is the poster child for the cycle of violence and counter-violence that seems to have no end but exhaustion of the combatants. But it isn't the only one. The death sentences in the notorious case of the Tripoli 6 and the execution of Saddam Hussein are two more.
We have dealt here depressingly often with the Tripoli 6 case, the health workers from Bulgaria and Palestine convicted in a Libyan court of intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV. The exclusion of vital scientific evidence that the virus was almost certainly a…
revere | December 19, 2006Science and justice have been on trial in Libya and both have lost. Today a Libyan court again condemned five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad after a retrial widely seen as unfair because it excluded exculpatory scientific evidence (see here and here and links therein).
An international legal observer, Francois Cantier of Lawyers Without Borders, promptly criticized the retrial as lacking scientific rigor. Research published this month said samples from the infected children showed their viruses were contracted before the six defendants started working at…
revere | December 16, 2006The verdict in the Tripoli 6 case is scheduled to be handed down on December 19. There has been worldwide recognition the science now shows the six defendants arrived in the country after the viral strains were circulating in the hospital and its environs, making the 400+ cases of HIV infection in children in the Benghazi Hospital in Libya most likely the result of poor hospital hygiene.
Not that you'd know it from the Libyan news media:
Bulgarian nurses are guilty, evidence show
2006-12-14
It's a big crime. More than Libyan 400 children were deliberately infected with HIV at Benghazi…
revere | December 7, 2006I don't know whether it is a preoccupation with Iraq or a preoccupation with oil or whether there's a difference, but the US State Department doesn't seem to have a clue about the Tripoli 6 case. This, is from yesterday's State Department press briefing, courtesy Declan Butler's ongoing roster of links to the case (McCormack is the State Department spokesperson):
[Reporter's] QUESTION: There's a scientific study published in -- by a British magazine today that would seem to set a scientific basis that those accused in the Libya HIV trial could not be guilty just because of findings that…
revere | December 6, 2006We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations…
revere | October 14, 2006The Campaign to free the Tripoli Six is entering a new and dangerous phase. On October 31 their trial resumes, with a death sentence again looming. For those not familiar with the case, The New York Times today summarized the situation in a strongly worded editorial:
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are facing the death penalty in Libya based on preposterous charges that they deliberately infected hundreds of children with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. This looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts…