Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. (...)
During the first trial, the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome's Tor Vergata University, to examine the scientific evidence. The researchers carried out a genetic analysis of viruses from the infected children, and concluded that many of them were infected long before the medics set foot in Libya in March 1998. Many of the children were also infected with hepatitis B and C, suggesting that the infections were spread by poor hospital hygiene. The infections were caused by subtypes of A/G HIV-1 — a recombinant strain common in central and west Africa, known to be highly infectious.
But the court threw out the report, arguing that an investigation by Libyan doctors had reached the opposite conclusion.(...)
According to Alexiev [defence lawyer on the case], the decision to throw out the report removed all scientific content from the case, leaving a series of prejudgements, and confessions extracted under torture. "It's scandalous," he says. "This is a complex scientific affair, and it is impossible to judge it without a scientific basis."
Montagnier, whose efforts helped secure a retrial in the first place, says he too is upset by how events in Tripoli are progressing. "It's a rerun of the first trial," he says. "It's embarassing politically for Gaddafi, but there is the pressure of the parents, who absolutely need to find a scapegoat. Of course this can't be the Libyans, so it falls on the medics."(...)
"If international pressure isn't stronger before the appeal, the risk is large that they will be condemned to death," predicts Michel Taube, co-founder of Together Against the Death Penalty, a French non-governmental organization. "To avoid that outcome, diplomacy is not enough. We need international mobilization."
Only a combined pressure from lawyers and scientists as well as politicians will make a difference, agrees Altit [defence lawyer Emmanuel Altit, a member of the Paris bar and a volunteer with Lawyers Without Borders, who has in the past defended inmates at Guantanamo Bay]. If the Supreme Court refuses a scientific assessment, then the international community will be able to ask: "What has it got to hide?" he says. "And if it agrees to a scientific investigation, then we will win."
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