Extracting Confessions Under Duress

Developments in the Benghazi Aids case, from Lebanon’s Daily Star:

SOFIA: A Bulgarian prosecutor is to file charges on Wednesday against 11 Libyan police officers for allegedly torturing five Bulgarian nurses who have been sentenced to death in Libya. “After completing the necessary police investigation, we believe there is enough evidence proving a crime,” Sofia Prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov told AFP on Tuesday.

He said he would be bringing charges in Bulgaria against the 11 officers, opening the way to a judicial investigation which itself could lead to a trial.

“They will be accused of extracting confessions under duress,” Kokinov said.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad in December 2006 after a court in Tripoli found them guilty of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV at a hospital in the northeastern Libyan town of Benghazi. The verdicts against the six foreigners, who have already spent eight years in a Libyan prison, were handed down on the basis of confessions by two of the nurses.

But the nurses recanted their confessions during the trial, saying they had been made under force. They also pressed charges against 10 police officers for “torturing” them. A Libyan court acquitted the police officers last year. The six medics maintain their innocence on the basis of testimony by international health experts. The latter argue that the AIDS virus spread because of poor hygiene in the hospital and that this took place before the nurses arrived there.

The nurses’ Libyan lawyer, Othman al-Bizanti, told AFP on Monday his clients have also been accused of slandering police and face questioning on February 11. Bizanti, who met the medics on Monday, said they were “in a bad psychological state” after being told of the slander accusation.

Libya has proposed a plan to release the nurses in exchange for compensation, the son of Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, Seif al-Islam, told a Bulgarian newspaper on Monday. Reacting to the interview, Bizanti said that “justice was independent of politics.”

Gadhafi’s son told the daily 24 Hours that “we have proposed a road map with solutions [satisfying] all parties: the parents, the Libyan government, the Bulgarian side, the EU.” He added that he had also discussed the plan with the foreign ministers of Germany and France.

Islam also promised that Libya would not carry out the death sentences against the six medics.

The Bulgarians have already rejected Libyan demands for payments to secure the release of the nurses, on the grounds that to pay any money would be to accept the women’s guilt. That was before the latest death sentences were handed down, and before it was shown by analysis of the HIV strain that the nurses, along with their Palestinian co-defendant, couldn’t possibly be guilty. It looks like they haven’t changed their minds – and this latest move is their answer to Gadhafi’s son’s “roadmap”.