that they confessed after enduring torture, including beatings, electric shock and sexual assault. Libyan officials denied all of the defendants prompt access to a lawyer, they said. In June, a Tripoli court acquitted 10 Libyan security officials accused of using torture against the defendants.
“There are credible allegations of torture against the foreign health workers,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “The Libyan Supreme Court should take these facts into account and reject the death sentences.” […]
Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, testified in the trial that the children were probably infected as a result of poor hygiene at the hospital, and that many of the children had been infected with HIV before the arrival of the foreign health workers in 1998.
But Libyan medical experts for the prosecution claimed the infections resulted from intentional injections of the AIDS virus by the Bulgarian and Palestinian medical workers. The prosecution claims the defendants confessed to their crime.
Four of the foreign health workers told Human Rights Watch that interrogators subjected them to electric shocks, beatings to the body with cables and wooden sticks, and beatings on the soles of their feet, in order to extract their confessions. In May, Human Rights Watch interviewed the foreign health workers in Tripoli’s Jadida prison.
“I confessed during torture with electricity. They put small wires on my toes and on my thumbs. Sometimes they put one on my thumb and another on either my tongue, neck or ear,” Valentina Siropulo, one of the Bulgarian defendants, told Human Rights Watch. “They had two kinds of machines, one with a crank and one with buttons.”
Another Bulgarian defendant, Kristiana Valceva, said interrogators used a small machine with cables and a handle that produced electricity.
“During the shocks and torture they asked me where the AIDS came from and what is your role,” she told Human Rights Watch. She said that Libyan interrogators subjected her to electric shocks on her breasts and genitals.
“My confession was all in Arabic without translation,” she said. “We were ready to sign anything just to stop the torture.”
Update: the Supreme Court has delayed a ruling until the end of January 2006.
This is interesting:
Bulgaria has refused a Libyan demand for payment to secure the release of the nurses, who have been held since 1999.
Bulgaria believes that to pay any money would be to accept the women’s guilt – something it has refused to do.
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