Blood money saves nurses
Libyan medical hostages saved by $1 million per family payout
EU, US, Bulgaria and Libya fund $460 million jackpot
Luc Montagnier can breathe easier now, along with many around the world who were concerned that the eight years of prison, rape and torture inflicted on five Bulgarian nurses and an Egyptian doctor in Libya would end in execution, as ordained by the Libyan Supreme Court.
A promise of $1 million per family has been made to the parents of the babies supposedly somehow infected by HIV at the Tripoli hospital, and this has been accepted as sufficient blood money to allow them to relent and be satisfied with a different outcome.
Reuters reports that the nurses can expect to be released from their torment soon by the Judicial Panel, now that the Libyan lynch mob has been paid off.
The payout is expected to bring to a close the eight-year legal case surrounding the medics and the children and remove a major obstacle to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s return to the international stage after decades of diplomatic isolation.
Montagnier is now released from the obligation of finally confessing that he, the half hearted originator of the global scientific fantasy launched by his rival Robert Gallo on the world in 1984, doesn’t really believe in it. This might have been the only way in which the lives of the nurses and doctor could have been saved, if the nearly half billion dollar payout hadn’t become available.
Unlikely as that may seem, we have sufficient confidence in Montagnier as the only leader of the political movement for HIV∫AIDS paradigm promulgation, protection and prevention of review to possess any gentlemanly qualities whatsoever that he might have considered abandoning the whole project with the lives of innocent men and women at stake.
Unlike the many millions of gays and black and brown people in Africa and Asia who have been and will be victims of the gross miscarriage of science with which Montagnier has been a half hearted fellow traveler. these six had faces, and their predicament was unjustified even by the false assumptions of standard HIV∫AIDS thinking that Montagnier has gone along with so skittishly for so long.
Montagnier was brave and decent enough to go to Tripoli and ascertain that the conditions in the city’s hospitals are so unhygienic that the motives of officials in scapegoating the Bulgarians became very clear, and he was willing to say so. It seems just possible that as the unfortunate group approached the Libya execution chamber that Montagnier, who in our opinion judging from his gourmand features is a lot more interested in the good life than he is in hurting people, would have broken down and confessed.
Now we shall never know, and indeed, the story will probably have the opposite effect, confirming the validity of HIV∫AIDS paradigm in the minds of millions more people around the world, who might otherwise have doubted it for the many conflicting claims inherent in the ideology which so flout common sense. The chief of these of course is a pandemic based on a condition of possessing HIV antibodies which cannot be transmitted between the sexes at a rate faster than 1 in 1000, if at all, as Nancy Padian’s research has confirmed.
After all, a paradigm that can sustain eight years of torture of innocent nurses, at least three of whom are very pretty, and a payout of nearly half a billion dollars, must be valid.
Mustn’t it?
Families receive settlement in Libya HIV nurses case:
Families receive settlement in Libya HIV nurses case
Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:07PM BST
By Salah Sarrar
TRIPOLI (Reuters) – The families of hundreds of HIV positive children in Libya received a $460 million (230 million pound) financial settlement on Tuesday, opening the door for a judicial panel to free six foreign medics condemned to death for infecting them.
The payout is expected to bring to a close the eight-year legal case surrounding the medics and the children and remove a major obstacle to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s return to the international stage after decades of diplomatic isolation.
The medics — five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor — were sentenced to death last year after being convicted of intentionally starting an HIV epidemic at a children’s hospital in the city of Benghazi. They say they are innocent.
Spokesman Idriss Lagha said 460 families in all had received “compensation money”, each family receiving $1.0 million.
He would not comment on speculation they would send a declaration to Libya’s High Judicial Council renouncing the medics’ death sentences but said the way appeared open for a pardon.
“They did not say they had pardoned the medics, but my personal interpretation is that their move is the equivalent of a pardon because the compensation money is the equivalent in Islam to ‘blood money’, which entails pardon,” he said.
In jail since 1999, the medics say they are innocent and confessions central to their case were extracted under torture.
Foreign HIV experts say the infections started before the workers arrived at the hospital and are more likely to be the result of poor hygiene.
The victims’ families have said the case was part of a Western attempt to undermine Muslims and Libya. Fifty-six of the children have died, which has provoked widespread anger in Libya over their suffering.
RULING EXPECTED
The High Judicial Council, which has the power to commute sentences or issue pardons, took over the case last week after Libya’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentences.
The Council has held off on ruling on the fate of the medics pending the families’ acceptance of the deal with the European Union, which has campaigned on behalf of its new member Bulgaria to have the nurses freed and sent home.
Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU commissioner for external relations, welcomed the families’ acceptance of the settlement.
“This is indeed good news,” she said.
“We trust that this should now permit the High Judicial Council to take a decision in favour of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor.” She added that the Union would continue to stand by commitments to assist the HIV infected children.
Lagha said many sources had contributed: “The money came from the Benghazi International Fund, which is financed by the European Union, United States, Bulgaria and Libya.”
He said the documents signed by the families would be taken to the judicial council later on Tuesday, and Othman Bizanti, a leading lawyer for the nurses, said he had “great hope” that the council would free the medics.
Bulgaria and its allies in the EU and the United States say Libya is using the medics as scapegoats to deflect criticism from a dilapidated health care sector.
They have also suggested that not freeing the nurses would hurt Gaddafi’s efforts to emerge from isolation, a process he began by scrapping a prohibited weapons programme in 2003.
© Reuters 2006.