QADDAFI'S LAW (OR LACK OF)

I came across the most appalling news yesterday – a group of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who have received the death sentence in Libya (for allegedly contaminating several hundred babies with the AIDS virus at a Benghazi hospital) will have their final appeal on November 15, 2005.

The situation has been dragging over a few years. Apparently, the Libyan government believes that the middle-aged ladies are Mossad (and CIA) spies and that they deliberately set out to infect all these children with the objective of undermining national security... During the first trial in 2002, the Bulgarian government wasn’t even notified. In addition to that, the Libyan officers working on the case admitted to using torture to extract confessions from the accused.

Even though this initial trial ended up in the medics’ favor, later ones did not. At a subsequent trial, renowned French AIDS researcher Luc Montagnier was brought in to testify about his findings on the situation; he declared that the children’s contamination was due to poor medical care and facilities. Still, the group was sentenced to death by firing squad. The case now is pending judgment by the Libyan Supreme Court.

The story is borderline ludicrous – the nurses come from different places in Bulgaria, some of them quite rural; it is hard to imagine that the Mossad would be interested in recruiting them. Not only that – are the Libyan authorities implying that the Palestinian doctor, who has lived in Libya with his family since 1967, is a Mossad agent as well?

Given Montagnier’s report on the poor sanitary conditions of the hospital, the Libyan government seems to be engaging in a bogus argument. Something reminiscent of the European tales of Jews sucking the blood out of infants, or being responsible for the Black Plague and so forth.

Another bizarre twist in the case – the Libyans suggested that the Bulgarian government pay $10 million to each of the 420 children infected; the basis for the suggestion would be the reparations the Libyan government had to pay to the families to the victims of the more than 200 people killed in Lockerbie by terrorists sponsored by Libya…

While all this goes on, the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor are being held in conditions that are most surely terrible; and children continue to be infected with the AIDS virus in the Benghazi hospital where the group worked (even though they are not there anymore), just as they were infected prior to the group’s arrival.

If the death sentence is really carried out in this case, it will be yet another testament to Qaddafi’s legendary blatant disregard for human life. I guess that even though the dictator dramatically renounced terrorism and nuclear weaponry in 2003, he forgot to renounce human rights abuses and violations, bigotry and hatred. Or maybe he just chose not to.