Word: libyans
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SOFIA, BULGARIA Nurses return after eight years in Libyan prison...
...past month - and Sarkozy's occasionally controversial diplomatic crusade on their behalf. Less than a month ago, the death penalty handed down with the medics' convictions of having willfully infected 438 children in a Benghazi hospital was upheld by Libya's highest legal body. But intense negotiations among Libyan, French and European Union authorities produced an agreement for the families of the HIV-infected children to receive up to $460 million in damages in exchange for their pardoning of the accused. Libya's legal system soon thereafter commuted the Bulgarians' death sentence to life in prison. Continued dialogue between France...
...after a major diplomatic effort led by France was followed on July 17 by Libya's highest legal body commuting the death sentences in the case to life in prison. Since then, efforts to secure their release have advanced so quickly that Sarkozy has accepted an invitation by Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi to visit the country - probably as an additional stop, on Wednesday, to an Africa trip Sarkozy had set to begin upon Thursday. But Elysée officials have since confided it would be unseemly for Sarkozy to meet Ghaddafi before the six Bulgarian nations were freed, raising expectations...
...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 who is accused with them) to go free, though it is not yet clear when. In a important step that will help the Libyan judicial system save face if charges are dropped, the families of the AIDS infected children said they are willing to "pardon" the nurses...
...will not be a victory for the truth: the nurses themselves may not be exonerated, even though two of the world's leading AIDS specialists investigated the case and concluded that the disease was spread not by the nurses - or by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, as Libyan prosecutors originally charged - but by poor hygiene at the government-run hospitals. Some of the children were infected before the nurses even arrived. Critics have charged that Gaddafi's government needed a scapegoat for a scandal that otherwise would have been laid at his door. The new deal is unlikely to disabuse...