five Bulgarian nurses on death row in Libya in a controversial AIDS case demanded...

five Bulgarian nurses on death row in Libya in a controversial AIDS case demanded compensation for being tortured in detention, Bulgarian national television reported. The nurses' Libyan lawyer, Othmane al-Bizanthi, told bTV each of them was demanding a million dinars (574,000 euros, 716,807 dollars) from the Libyan authorities. 
The lawyer said a case against 10 police officers accused by the women of torturing them would begin in Libya on January 25. The nurses were sentenced to death, along with a Palestinian doctor, in May 2004 on charges of infecting 380 children with the AIDS virus and causing the death of 46 others while working in the city's children's hospital in Benghazi in northern Libya.
At their trial in May, after five years in detention, all six defendants pleaded not guilty. Two of the nurses and the doctor said during the trial that they were tortured into confessing. Medical experts testified at the trial that the HIV infections were the result of poor hygiene at the hospital and that the epidemic was under way before the nurses arrived.