PressEthic

Libya has been much in the news recently as the trial, in Tripoli, of five foreign health workers accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV is coming to a close.

From CNN

The medics were found guilty in a first trial in 2004 and sentenced to death by firing squad. But the supreme court overturned the ruling last year and ordered the case returned to a lower court.

The medics have denied the charges in both their first and second trials and have repeatedly testified that they were tortured to make them confess.

Luc Montagnier, a French doctor who first detected the HIV virus, has said it emerged in the Benghazi hospital in 1997, a year before the medics arrived.

He said in testimony at their first trial the children were most probably infected through negligence and poor hygiene.

This case seems crystal clear to me. In all of the coverage that I have read, I have never seen any explanation of what possible motivation five Bulgarian and Palestinian medics could have for large scale child-murder. But it requires no explanation to understand that the Libyan government would not want to be held responsible for criminal negligence resulting in the slow death of 400 plus of its native children. Is it not more likely that a country that still sentences criminals to "death by firing squad" might lack the proper medical know-how to screen all blood transfusions for HIV?

The Libyan government has offered to release the Bulgarian nurses if Sofia will cough up 4.6 billion dollars, which would ostensibly go to the families of the fatally ill children. Sofia has refused.

Although these unfortunate health workers will likely be hearing the word "fire" (or, rather, its Libyan equivalent) in the near future, the biggest crime against humanity has been comitted against hundreds of Libyan children, and their own government, as it seems, is solely to blame.