The verdict in the retrial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV will be delivered on December 19, the court said Saturday.
Present in court for Saturday's session were the nurses and doctor, who worked at a hospital in the north-eastern city of Benghazi, allegedly infected 426 children with HIV - 52 of whom have since died of AIDS.
The accused, who had all pleaded not guilty, were given a chance to speak during the three-hour session and repeated their innocence pleas and expressed solidarity with the victims' families, which are demanding compensation.
At the previous session on October 31, after a five-week break because of the illness of main defence lawyer Osman al-Bizanti, the nurses' counsel charged that the two of the accused had only confessed under torture. The prosecution, meanwhile, reiterated the need for the defendants to take responsibility.
An initial trial in Benghazi sentenced the six to death by firing squad in May 2004. Libya's supreme court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.
On Sunday, representatives of the dead children's families are to meet with EU delegates in an encounter organised by the Kadhafi Foundation to discuss compensation, Saleh Abdelsalem, the charity's foundation, told AFP. In December, Britain, Bulgaria, the European Union and the United States created an international fund to help Libya fight AIDS, renovate the Benghazi hospital and compensate victims or their families.
The case has stirred mounting calls for fairness from the scientific community. In an open letter to Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, published Friday in the online version of the British science journal Nature, more than 100 Nobel science laureates pleaded for a fair trial.
"Strong scientific evidence is needed to establish the cause of this infection," they said. "However, independent science-based evidence from international experts has so far not been permitted in court."
The letter demanded that defence lawyers have the right to call and examine witnesses on the health workers' behalf under the same conditions as witnesses called against them. They also appealed for internationally recognised AIDS experts to examine and testify on the evidence as to the cause of the HIV infections in the children.
Last month, an international group of physicians and scientists urged Libya to free the medics, citing lack of proof. "Convicting a small group of individuals of such an appalling crime as the deliberate infection of 400 innocent children requires a very high degree of proof," the group of US, Canadian and European scientists wrote in a letter published in the October 25 issue of the US journal Science.
Five months ago, the court rejected a defence motion for a new international probe into the reasons for the spread of AIDS in Libya, but agreed to re-examine a report drawn up by Libyan experts.
A 2003 inquiry by an international specialist at the request of Libyan authorities concluded that the hospital infections were the result of poor hygiene. A second study by three Libyan experts found that "given the significant number of infected patients, they were deliberately infected with the virus."
The case has soured relations between Tripoli and the West since former pariah state Libya came back into the international fold after abandoning its programme to develop weapons of mass destruction in 2003.