By Patricia Reaney - Reuters

LONDON – Scientists have produced new evidence that casts doubts on charges against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV in 1998.

The trial of the six health workers ended in Tripoli last month. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty after five Libyan HIV/AIDS experts stood by their 61-page report written in 2003 that found the infections resulted from an intentional act. A Libyan court is expected to deliver a verdict on December 19.

But a team of international scientists who have reconstructed the history of the virus from samples from the children have shown the subtype of HIV began infecting patients at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi before the foreign medical team arrived.

“The evidence shows the chain of infection started a few years before the arrival of the foreign staff accused of causing it deliberately,” Dr Tulio de Oliveira, a molecular virologist at Oxford University in England, said in an interview.

The scientists, whose findings are published online by the journal Nature, analyzed the genetic code of the HIV and Hepatitis C viruses from the children to determine when the outbreaks started. They carried out an extensive analysis using 20 different models.

“All of them give a date for the start of the epidemic around the mid-1990s,” said de Oliveira.

He added that a team of 10 specialists from around the world who reviewed the research think the results are “extremely solid.” The six medical workers, who have protested their innocence and said their confessions had been made under torture, arrived in Libya in March 1998. They have been in detention since 1999.

De Oliveira and his colleagues in Oxford collaborated with scientists from several European universities to conduct an independent scientific assessment of the data. Their findings are expected to be presented to the Libyan authorities.