Blood money

The son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is negotiating with EU officials over the fates of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who are on death row for what Libya says was the intentional infection of more than 400 children with HIV in 1998.

Foreign experts who studied the case – including one of the men who discovered the AIDS virus – testified during the medical workers’ trial that many of the children had contracted the virus before the accused even arrived in the country, and that the spread of the disease in the Benghazi children’s hospital was not a plot on the workers’ part but the fault of substandard sanitary conditions and practices at the hospital.

Libya, of course, rejected those findings out of hand, preferring the much more convenient and diversionary explanation of a foreign plot. (Gaddafi blamed the CIA and the Mossad.)

The medical workers said they were tortured – police have even admitted to using attack dogs and electric shock equipment in the interrogations (see here and here) – before confessing to the crimes, for which they are to face a firing squad.

Perhaps by sending the children to Europe for treatment last year on its own dime (or dinar) Libya made an admission of sorts… or perhaps it was just part of a PR campaign in what is already an elaborate farce.

As mentioned above, Gaddafi’s son is negotiating with EU officials. The word “negotiating” is significant because the families of the infected children are asking for 10 million euros each for their suffering. That’s up from 10 million dollars a while back, up from less than 4 million bucks before that. It’s an interesting tactic: the less of a case you have, the more money you demand!