European leaders condemn HIV verdict in Libya

Bulgarian and EU leaders have condemned today’s convictions in Libya of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death for allegedly infecting 400 children with the HIV virus.

“We call upon the Libyan authorities to intervene immediately and in the name of elementary justice to reconsider and reject these absurd verdicts and to set the Bulgarian medics and the Palestinian doctor free,” President Georgi Parvanov and Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said in a joint statement issued hours after the hearing in Tripoli.