The five Bulgarian health professionals and the Palestinian doctor, who have been in prison in Libya for years, waiting for the Court’s decision, were sentenced to death by firing squad by the Benghazi Criminal Court.

Those sentenced to death are: five Bulgarian nurses — Kristiana Malinova Valcheva, Nasya Stojcheva Nenova, Valentina Manolova Siropulo, Valya Georgieva Chervenyashka and Snezhanka Ivanova Dimitrova — and one Palestinian doctor — Ashraf Ahmad Jum’a. Zdravko Marinov Georgiev, a sixth Bulgarian defendant, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Nine Libyan doctors in the same trial were all acquitted.

They are accused of deliberately infecting 426 children with the HIV virus, while working in al-Fateh Children’s Hospital in Benghazi. They claim they were tortured in order to extract confessions, which they later retracted on the basis that they had been forcibly coerced. Independant investigation of international professionals concluded that the infection had been caused by poor hygiene in the hospital.

All Bulgarians are shocked by the imposition of these death sentences. There are demonstrations in front of the Libyan embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. "Don’t sacrifice human lives due to political reasons", say the posters of the people. "Everybody knows there are not fair trials in dictatorships like Libya. Desicions are made not in the court but somewhere else.", said the Head of Helsinki Federation for the Bulgarian National Television.