New scientific evidence in Libyan HIV court case

LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) Scientists have produced new evidence that casts doubts on charges against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV in 1998.

The trial of the six health workers ended in Tripoli last month.

The prosecutor demanded the death penalty after five Libyan HIV/AIDS experts stood by their 61-page report written in 2003 that found the infections resulted from an intentional act.

A Libyan court is expected to deliver a verdict on December 19.

But a team of international scientists who reconstructed the history of the virus from samples from the children have shown the subtype of HIV began infecting patients at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi before the foreign medical team arrived.

''The evidence shows the chain of infection started a few years before the arrival of the foreign staff accused of causing it deliberately,'' Dr Tulio de Oliveira, a molecular virologist at Oxford University in England, said in an interview.

The scientists, whose findings are published online by the journal Nature, analysed the genetic code of HIV and Hepatitis C viruses from the children to determine when the outbreaks started.

They did an extensive analysis using 20 different models.

''All of them give a date for the start of the epidemic around the mid-1990s,'' said De Oliveira.

He added that a team of 10 specialists from around the world who reviewed the research think the results are ''extremely solid.'' The six medical workers, who have protested their innocence and said their confessions had been made under torture, arrived in Libya in March 1998. They have been in detention since 1999.

INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC ASSESSMENT De Oliveira and his colleagues in Oxford collaborated with scientists from several European universities to conduct an independent scientific assessment of the data. Their findings are expected to be presented to the Libyan authorities.

The medical workers were sentenced to death by firing squad after being convicted in a trial in 2004. The verdict was quashed last year by the supreme court and the case was sent to a lower court.

Earlier scientific evidence provided by Luc Montagnier, a co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, concluded the infection at the hospital resulted from poor hygiene and the reuse of syringes and had also begun before 1998.

''All the lines of scientific evidence point in the same direction, towards a long standing infection control problem at the hospital, dating back to the mid 1990s or earlier,'' Dr Oliver Pybus, of Oxford University and a co-author of the Nature report, said in a statement.

The United States, which is in the process of restoring full iplomatic ties with Libya after decades of hostility, backs Bulgaria and the European Union in saying the medical workers are innocent.

Libya has been under pressure to hear independent scientific evidence about the case. International experts have criticised the scientific report used in the trial.

In an open letter to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi published last month in Nature, more than 100 Nobel Laureates in the sciences called for a fair trial for the medics.

''A miscarriage of justice will take place without proper consideration of scientific evidence. We urge the appropriate authorities to take the necessary steps to permit such evidence to be used in this case,'' the Nobel winners wrote in the letter.

Lawyers representing the families of the infected children have requested compensation of 15 million Libyan dinars (11.6 million dollars) for each infected child, which would lead to a total bill of about 4.6 billion dollars.

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