Health Blog : An Ugly Saga of Politics and AIDS Winds Down: "Another ugly chapter in the annals of politics and medicine came to a close this morning, as eight years of prison ended for five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of willfully infecting Libyan children with the virus that causes AIDS.
Their release required hard lobbying by the European Union, a bit of diplomatic double-talk, and hundreds of millions in cash payments.
The nurses and doctor, who worked at a Libyan children’s hospital, were arrested in 1999 and charged with deliberately infecting some 400 children with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The defendants confessed to the crimes — but only after being tortured with electric shocks and beaten with cables and sticks, according to a 2006 editorial in the medical journal the Lancet"
