Word: libya
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...nurses were first arrested back in 1999, after doctors found that the AIDS virus had spread to children at a hospital in Libya's second largest city of Benghazi. Despite international appeals for the medics' release, they were sentenced to death by firing squad in 2004. Appeals ended this week with the upholding of the sentence, an apparent technicality. The case now moves to the country's top legal body, which will have the option to annul the charges or, more likely, some observers say, to commute the sentence, which would allow the nurses (and one Palestinian doctor...
...good bit of news. But in the case of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who have been held in an African prison for the past eight years on charges of having deliberately injected 438 children with AIDS-tainted blood, the ruling by a high court in Libya could be the beginning of the end of a high-stakes international drama. Within the next week, the nurses, now aged 41 to 54, who at one point accused their interrogators of torture and sexual abuse, may be released to return home. If they are freed, the outcome would...
...negotiate on its behalf. The U.S. is also a strong supporter of Bulgaria thanks to its vociferous backing for U.S. operations in Iraq and elsewhere. (President Bush has called for the nurses' release.) But Western countries are also especially eager to smooth over any lingering problems with Gaddafi. Libya remains 'exhibit A' in the Western attempt to convince the world and notably Iran that giving up nuclear weapons' ambitions has its rewards. New oil deals with British and American oil companies are also being inked. On the same day that the judicial proceedings against the nurses ended this week, Washington...
...appears to have benefited from a spurious accusation by winning some medical treatment and financial aid for the victims families. (The amount of money going to families is still unknown and both Bulgaria and the E.U. refuse to call it "compensation" since that implies guilt.) "We should never underestimate Libya," says the Bulgarian journalist Melkov. "Gaddafi has been able to make the West demonstrate compassion for the victims of Benghazi, while at the same time trading his aces in the best possible way on the international stage. He plays his cards very well...
...life. (In recent years, he's swapped the gun for round-the-clock bodyguards, although the nickname it earned him, "The Sheriff," has stuck.) He was known as a hands-on investigator who would literally picked through wreckage of a downed airliner, or rent a boat to enter Libya to investigate the agents he accused of blowing it up. And in 1996, Bruguiere arranged the arrest and extradition of notorious terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" - author of a number of bombings in Paris in the 1980s - from Sudan, spirited away after he'd been sedated to undergo surgery on a varicose...