Health

EIGHT years after being accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV, six foreign medics jailed in Libya have been released.

The five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were charged in 1999 after an outbreak of HIV at the Al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi. They were sentenced to death last December despite complaints from Nobel laureates and scientific organisations over the evidence used in the case. For example, analysis of the DNA from HIV taken from the children indicated that the outbreak had begun before the medics arrived.

Concerted behind-the-scenes lobbying by politicians now seems to have saved the group. On 17 July, Libya's High Judicial Council announced it would commute the sentences to life imprisonment, allowing the nurses and doctor, who has taken Bulgarian citizenship, to fly to Bulgaria on 24 July, where President Georgi Patvanov pardoned them.

Full details of the deal have not been released, but the European Union says it has agreed to fund a national AIDS prevention programme. Media reports stated that the affected families, more than 50 of whom have seen their children die, will also share $460 million in compensation.

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