In spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, a judge in Tripoli has again sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death on charges that they deliberately infected 400 children with the HIV virus. From CNN:
The presiding judge, Mahmoud Hawissa, took only seven minutes to confirm the presence of the accused — who all answered “yes” in Arabic — and read out his verdict and sentence in the longest and most politicized court process in modern Libyan history.
The six defendants, detained for nearly seven years, had previously been convicted and condemned to death, but Libyan judges granted them a retrial last year after international protests over the fairness of the proceedings.
It’s tempting to make flip jokes about Qaddafi, who initially claimed that these medical professionals were Mossad and CIA agents, or about the prosecutor’s paranoid claim that it was a nefarious Bulgarian experiment, carried out on the children of Libya… or to mock a judicial system that thinks confessions via rape or electrocution carry weight, or where a new trial doesn’t admit new evidence.
But there’d be no satisfaction in poking fun at Libya; innocent children are dying, and the country has demanded a scapegoat — science, innocence, and international condemnation be damned.
The trial in Tripoli never was about justice. It’s a political lever for a government that can’t face its own culpability for the HIV infections and death and for a leader who’s playing for much bigger stakes than it would seem on the surface.
What a travesty.
For more information: The BBC has a complete timeline, and Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry with a number of sources.