Who Are The Tripoli 6?

In 1998, at The Al-Fateh Hospital in Bengali, Libya, 6 foreign medical aid workers were accused of deliberately infecting over 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus. The group consisted of a Palestinian doctor and 5 female Bulgarian nurses. At the time this seemed like rather fantastic news. A truly henious charge. Why would anyone commit an act so insanely evil?
The Libyans were outraged and there was a trial and the Tripoli 6 as they became known, were condemned to death in 2004. The parents of the children wanted justice!
But, the verdict was overturned because of international protest that the trial had been unfair.
They were held in prison all this time and there were actual confessions obtained under torture. The case became an imflamatory example of xenophobic paranoia.
The scientific community of the world began to get involved and investigate.
They found that the infections in the children were also accompanied by hepatitis B and C which were indicative of poor hygienic conditions in the hospital. They also concluded that most of the children were infected before the medical workers arrived in 1998. They also identified the HIV strain as A/G HIV-1, a highly infectious recombinant
strain found in Central West Africa.
These findings were made independantly by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Doctors and researchers at the Tor Vegatata University in Rome.
They were recently publiished in Nature Magazine.
This was introduced in the new trial which has been ongoing in Tripoli for the last year and a half. The Libyan court threw out thiis evidence stating that Libyan doctors had calimed to find the opposite conclusion, Luc Montagnier believes that this judgement was based on a faulty translation from English to Arab of the term recombinant, which referred to the recombination of wild viruses. The court translated it as genetically modified, implying human manipulation.
This has become a case of Libyan internal politics. It is much easier to scapegoat the foreign aid workers than to admit that there were hygiene problems in the hospital.
There could be diplomatic moves by both the United States and Europe to exert pressure on Libya to reconsider its stance and release the 6. Americas recent decision to re establish diplomatic ties with Libya and the PR value of this act in the Arab world seems to be a factor in the reluctance ot get involved. Gadaffi is treated with kid gloves by both the US and the EU.
Libya has even gone so far as to hint that it might take a cash ransom to settle the case.
The organization Lawyers Without Borders has defended the 6 for these last 6 years. The second trial has ended and sentencing is to be given on December 14th. Now is the time to find out what you can do, a letter to your congressman, the Libyan Embassy demanding that a fully independant international scientific assessment be made of how the children were contaminated. This trial has recieved very little press in the United States and asked in a recent press conference, Tony Snow seemed to not be aware of any of the facts at all.
If you want to find out more about this issue, a very good place to start is the science blog, Effect Measure. http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure