SOFIA: Zorka Anachkova still recoils with horror when she recalls the indictment. Issued by a Libyan court in 2000, it charged her daughter Kristiana and four other Bulgarian nurses with intentionally infecting 426 children with the HIV virus.
“It said they were murderers,” said Anachkova, a retired cook. “I cried all night. You have heard the phrase ‘a broken heart’? I know what it means.
“My heart has ached ever since,” she told Reuters from her modest two-room apartment in a Sofia suburb.
Last year, the court sentenced the nurses and a Palestinian doctor colleague to death, intensifying a standoff that has threatened Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s efforts to renew ties with the West after decades in isolation.
Bulgaria and its allies, the European Union and the United States, condemned the verdicts, pointing to allegations that the nurses were tortured to extract confessions and to expert medical testimony indicating they were not present when the epidemic broke out.
However, in the Mediterranean port of Benghazi, where Libya says at least 50 of the children have died of Aids, the victims’ families have demanded vengeance.
In custody since 1999, the nurses have what may be a last chance to escape a firing squad on Nov. 15, when the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a final appeal and either uphold the verdicts or call a retrial.
The date has already been pushed back once though, and analysts say a quick solution this time is also unlikely.
With a risk of domestic unrest in Benghazi if the nurses are freed — the Mediterranean port is a bastion of anti-Qadhafi dissent — the court is likely to uphold the guilty verdicts, the analysts say.
However, Qadhafi faces what the West says is a mountain of evidence showing the nurses are innocent and he has too much at stake.
“He therefore has an impossible circle to square,” said George Joffe, who lectures on the Middle East and North Africa at Cambridge University’s Centre for International Studies.
“If the court simply accepts the evidence, it would have to release the nurses...which would enrage the local population and might spark off violence. If Qadhafi can, on the other hand, find a way out, it would please everyone.”—Reuters
