TRIPOLI: A Libyan court acquitted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medic on Sunday of charges of slandering policemen by protesting that their confessions had been extracted under torture. The ruling came just hours after an organization headed by a son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said the whole saga may soon be resolved.
At a hearing lasting less than a minute during which the six defendants were not present, judge Salem al-Homari announced they had been found not guilty and ordered the plaintiffs to pay the legal costs. The nurses' lawyer Othman al-Bizanti welcomed the ruling and told AFP the charges had been "unfounded," but one of the plaintiffs, Jomaa al-Mishri, said it was taken under political pressure and he would appeal.
The five nurses - Kristiana Valcheva, Nassia Nenova, Valia Cherveniachka, Valentina Siropoulo and Snejana Dimitrova - and doctor Ashraf Ahmad Jomaa had faced a maximum penalty of three years in prison. The six have already been in custody for eight years and were condemned to death in May 2004 on charges of deliberately injecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV, which can cause AIDS, at a hospital in the city of Benghazi.