After eight years in prison, six medical workers have been sentenced to death in Libya, charged with having deliberately infected more than 400 children with HIV.
Supporters of the Bulgarian and Palestinian aid workers say their confessions were elicited through torture, and Libyan government is trying to cover up the real culprit — unhygenic hospital conditions, and a failing health care system.
Link to today's news (AP). There's scientific background on the case at the journal Nature (including an analysis of HIV and hepatitis samples from the infected children) (Link), and a thread over at MeFi, too (Link). The New England Journal of Medicine has a related editorial here: Link. Snip:
"Science has not been respected in this court; without the scientific evidence, there's no way there could be a fair trial," said Richard Roberts, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who hand-delivered a letter of protest signed by more than 100 Nobel laureates to the Libyan Mission to the United Nations in New York in late October. "The Libyan government doesn't want to admit that their hospital had a problem with hygiene that spread HIV," said Roberts. "These people were the ideal scapegoats: they were foreigners. And the Libyans knew that the Bulgarian and Palestinian governments couldn't kick up much of a fuss."
