LIBYA: Libya's Supreme Court postponed a decision yesterday on whether to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face the death sentence for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV.
The court pushed back the ruling to November, prolonging the jail misery of the medics but raising hopes in Bulgaria and Brussels that they may ultimately be freed, after the EU offered medical help to the children, a key demand of the Libyan authorities.
Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov, who met Libya's Col Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli last week to plead for the prisoners, called the postponement "encouraging news".
Mr Parvanov said it could "open the way for a full investigation of the truth about the tragedy and a just solution of the case of our compatriots, about whose innocence we have no doubt".
The doctor and nurses were arrested in 1999 and sentenced to death last year for giving HIV-infected blood to about 400 children, in what prosecutors called a plot hatched by foreign intelligence services to undermine Libyan security.
The medics denied the charges and say they were tortured until they confessed.
International HIV experts have denounced the case as a smokescreen to obscure poor hygiene practices in Libyan hospitals.
Washington and the EU have condemned Libya's prosecution of the case, and its demand for compensation similar to that which Col Gadafy paid for the Lockerbie airliner bombing, which was blamed on his agents.
