Libya Said to Lift Death Penalty of 6 Convicted in H.I.V. Case

Libya will not execute five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were sentenced to death earlier this year for infecting more than 400 children with H.I.V. in 1998, according to a son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. “No one is going to execute anyone,” Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi said Wednesday. This month or next, he said, the country will pass new laws that will limit capital punishment to a small number of crimes. “Capital punishment is going to be finished,” he said. Mr. Qaddafi, 32, who heads a charitable organization helping to negotiate a resolution to the case, said Libya would like to extradite the nurses to Bulgaria but suggested it might link that to the extradition of a Libyan man serving a life sentence in Scotland for the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He did not say what might be done with the Palestinian doctor. Libyan officials said this month that they were willing to “re-examine” the death sentences of the nurses and doctor but that such a move would depend on Bulgaria’s paying compensation to the families of the children infected, more than 40 of whom have died. Bulgaria has refused, saying that would acknowledge the medical workers’ guilt. Full Story