Libya's Supreme Court will hear an appeal next week by five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death on charges of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the HIV virus, Bulgaria said on Friday.
However, the sitting is unlikely to mark the end of a case that has weighed on the otherwise improving relations between Libya and the West. Bulgarian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev said the court would sit on June 20. Othman Bizanti, leading lawyer for the five nurses, said he had been given the same date.
Legal experts say the court might hold several sittings before delivering its ruling. The six medics were sentenced to death in December after being convicted of infecting 426 Libyan children with the deadly virus while they worked at the children's hospital in the city of Benghazi in the 1990s. In jail since 1999, they say they are innocent and were tortured to make them confess.
Bulgaria and its allies in Brussels and Washington have all been trying to secure their release, and failure to free the nurses would carry a heavy diplomatic cost for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But an acquittal would generate public anger in Libya.
"It is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will find an error in law or an error in fact, and it may well confirm the sentences," said George Joffe, a research fellow at Cambridge University's Centre of International Studies.
Attention has focused on talks that resumed last month between the European Union and the association of the families of the children on a deal to provide funds for the families.
The families have asked for 10 million euros ($13.3 million) for each child. Both sides have suggested agreement is close, and Libya has hinted it could free the nurses if an agreement is reached.
Bulgarian officials say it would not be taken into account by the Supreme Court, but would be put before Libya's High Judicial Council which has the power to amend or overturn decisions by the judiciary. Joffe said this would allow Gaddafi to exercise clemency:
"My guess is that he would then announce a compensation package that will allow him to say: 'We can let them go free for the sake of the greater good of the country'."