The Gathering

The nurses and doctor have been in jail since 1999 on charges that they intentionally spread the HIV virus to more than 400 children at a hospital in the city of Benghazi during what Libya claims was a botched experiment to find a cure for AIDS. Fifty of the children have died, and the rest have been treated in Europe.

The genetic information of HIV changes over time, which provides a "molecular clock" that the researchers used to estimate a time frame for the outbreak. They concluded it must have begun before the accused health care workers arrived at the hospital, perhaps by three years or so.

The available evidence in the case suggests the children's HIV infections resulted from a longstanding problem of poor infection control at the hospital, perhaps involving improper sterilization before injections, said Oliver Pybus of Oxford University.

History of outbreak

The researchers worked on blood samples collected by a network of European clinical research centres that are involved in treating the infected children.

By analysing mutations in the genetic material of the HIV virus found in the samples they were able to reconstruct the history of the outbreak.

In a statment, researchers Dr Tulio de Oliveira and Dr Oliver Pybus, from Oxford University, said: "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 Thomas Leitner, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has provided forensic evidence in many HIV cases.

Writing in Nature, he said the latest research was "compelling evidence that the outbreak had started before the accused could have started it."

There has been mounting international pressure on Libya to hear independent scientific evidence.

International experts say the scientific report used in the trial was nothing but 'conjecture' and 'supposition'.

Last month 114 Nobel Laureates wrote an open letter to Colonel Gaddafi urging the appropriate authorities to hear independent science-based evidence, and reaffirming the need for a fair trial.

Human rights in Libya
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to the U.S. Department of State’s annual human rights report for 2004, Libya’s authoritarian regime continued to have a poor record in the area of human rights. Some of the numerous and serious abuses on the part of the government include poor prison conditions, arbitrary arrest and detention, prisoners held incommunicado, and political prisoners held for many years without charge or trial. The judiciary is controlled by the state, and there is no right to a fair public trial. Libyans do not have the right to change their government. Freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion are restricted. Independent human rights organizations are prohibited. Domestic violence against women appears to be widespread, and there have been reports of trafficking in persons. Ethnic and tribal minorities suffer discrimination, and the state continues to restrict the labor rights of foreign workers. One of the more problematic issues is that of six foreign health workers (five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor) who were accused of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV-tainted blood in a hospital in 1999. On May 6, 2004, a Libyan court sentenced the workers to death. International observers have expressed concerns over the confessions of the health workers, which appear to have been forced.
In 2005, the Freedom House rated political rights in Libya as "7" (1 representing the most free and 7 the least free rating), civil liberties as "7" and gave it the freedom rating of "Not Free"