BARROSO CONDITIONS TIES WITH LIBYA ON FATE OF BULGARIANS ON DEATH ROW

The European Union chief executive said Libya’s efforts to build closer ties with the bloc would depend on the fate of six foreign medics it has sentenced to death for allegedly causing an AIDS outbreak.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso told journalists at the EU headquarters in Brussels that he had urged all EU country leaders to raise the issue of the medics –five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor - in their contacts with Libya’s leader Moammar Gaddafi.
French President Jaques Chirac, who started Wednesday a visit to Libya – the first ever by a French head of state to the Arab country - has also pledged to urge Gaddafi to respect human rights and free the medics.
They are appealing death sentences a court in the city of Benghazi handed them last April on charges of deliberately injecting more that 400 children at a local hospital with blood contaminated with the HIV virus that causes AIDS.
They have complained from savage beating, rapes and electric shocks during preliminary interrogations after their arrest in Feb. 1999.
Bulgaria has branded the verdict absurd and has won overwhelming international support for its effort to persuade Tripoli commute it.
The court in Benghazi has ignored evidence by leading international experts, including the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, French doctor Luc Montagnier, who said the infection had started at the hospital before it hired the Bulgarians and continued after their arrest.