Libya Conspiracy Theory Puts 6 Lives in Limbo

It all sounds too bizarre for anyone to take seriously. But for six Bulgarian medical workers imprisoned in Libya, outlandish accusations by Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi about a plot to spread AIDS are no joke.

A Libyan prosecutor is seeking the death penalty against the five nurses and one doctor, who are charged with intentionally infecting 393 children with the human immunodeficiency virus at a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi. The indictment says the Bulgarians sought to undermine the security of the Libyan state.

The trial, which opened in February but has repeatedly been adjourned, is scheduled to resume Sunday. The proceedings in Libya have prompted growing outrage by the government and public in Bulgaria, where the charges are seen as motivated by Kadafi’s domestic and international political calculations.

In a speech to the African summit on HIV/AIDS held in Nigeria in late April, Kadafi painted a picture of a vast conspiracy in which the CIA created HIV, the virus that causes AIDS; Western pharmaceutical companies profit from it; and the Bulgarians gave it to Libyan children for experimental purposes, perhaps at the behest of U.S. or Israeli intelligence services.

“This is a catastrophe, an odious crime,” Kadafi said in remarks to the summit that were broadcast live on Libyan television and translated by the BBC Worldwide Monitoring service. “Who charged them with this odious task? Some said it was the CIA. Others said it was the Mossad Israeli intelligence. They carried out an experiment on these children.”

The alleged plot was uncovered, Kadafi said, after children suffering from AIDS were found in Sirte, Misratah, Sebha, Tripoli and Dirnah. “After examination, we found out that all these children, at one time or another, were treated at the Benghazi children’s hospital. They were born, vaccinated or slept there,” Kadafi said.

In a possible clue to his motivations, Kadafi vaguely linked the prosecution of the Bulgarians to the recent trial in a Scottish court of two Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.

The Bulgarians will face “an international trial, like the Lockerbie trial,” Kadafi said, without elaborating.

The Scottish court convicted one defendant and acquitted the other. Many observers suspect that Kadafi ordered the aircraft’s bombing in revenge for a U.S. bombing raid on Libya in 1986 in which two of his sons were wounded and his 15-month-old adopted daughter was killed. Washington said the raid was aimed at a Libyan terror network.

Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nadezhda Mikhailova met Monday with Arab ambassadors in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, to complain that Kadafi appeared to be seeking political benefits from the trial of the medical personnel.

“The analogy made with the Lockerbie trial prompts thoughts about political moves aimed at turning the Bulgarian citizens into scapegoats for settling scores with other countries,” Mikhailova told reporters after the meeting. “Bulgaria will not accept a political trial against its citizens in Libya. . . . We think that putting the trial in the context of experiments ordered by foreign forces--because [Kadafi’s] speech mentions the CIA and Mossad--means politicizing the trial.”

The trial has been big news in Bulgaria for months. “Death Sentences Await Bulgarians in Libya in May?” read a headline last month in the Monitor daily newspaper.

Earlier this month, the Bulgarian newspaper Trud, citing unidentified Bulgarian intelligence sources, said Libyan authorities had picked Benghazi as the location for the alleged scandal because it is a stronghold of opposition to Kadafi.

Accusations against the CIA or Mossad may be intended to obscure the fact that the real target is domestic opposition in Benghazi, according to this analysis.

After Mikhailova’s meeting with Arab ambassadors, Bulgaria’s state-run radio reported that the country is seeking international support for its demands regarding the six defendants, including permission for independent medical experts to check the evidence, for the defense to check analyses of blood products allegedly found in the apartment of one of the defendants and for defense attorneys to question witnesses and defendants.

Bulgaria will ask the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent Society and the United Nations to become involved, the radio reported. The Arab ambassadors were asked to brief their governments on the demands of the Bulgarian side and to request that they send observers to the trial.