The courtroom drama that followed was Kafkaesque. The prosecution presented evidence of the medics confessing to the crime. (They later claimed they were tortured into confessing.) In return, the prosecution said, for large sums of money provided by shady figures known as “John the Englishman” and “Adel the Egyptian,” the medical workers had systematically injected the man-made virus into the children’s veins. The medics were depicted as living extravagant lifestyles with their ill-gotten wealth, consuming alcohol in public and indulging in extramarital sexual intercourse, both of which are illegal in Libya. The smoking gun, exhibited with much fanfare, was a vial that the police claimed to have found at the home of one of the nurses. Libyan experts told the court that they had performed tests on residues that proved that it contained HIV.
In September 2002, the phone rang in immunologist Vittorio Colizzi’s office at Tor Vergata University in Rome. Upon finding that his old friend microbiologist Luc Montagnier was calling from Paris, Colizzi launched merrily into French with the same Italian accent that laces his English. But it was immediately clear that this was urgent business rather than a friendly chat. Montagnier wanted to know if Colizzi would be willing to travel to Libya. It seemed that the Libyans were reaching out for help—or at least Qaddafi’s son and presumed successor, Seif al-Islam, seemed to be doing so. Al-Islam had contacted Montagnier, leader of one of the first teams to isolate the HIV virus in 1983, through the Libyan ambassador to Unesco in Paris. He was asking for an independent group of European scientists to study the HIV outbreak in Benghazi and reach their own conclusion about how it had originated and spread. Montagnier asked Colizzi to lead the Libyan investigation.
Colizzi landed in Tripoli three months later, in January 2003. He began by assembling a timeline of the outbreak. At first, the hospital officials balked, but Colizzi finally obtained spreadsheets of the clinical records and discovered amazing exculpatory information. At least a dozen of the infected children hadn’t visited the hospital since 1997, some of them not since 1994—long before March 1998, when the accused medics started working there. As if that weren’t proof enough of innocence, a newborn became infected at the hospital months after the medics were arrested: The outbreak had continued after the alleged culprits were removed from the scene of the crime.
When Colizzi mentioned these facts, hospital officials claimed they were errors in the record. A new version of the hospital records was produced, this one with the children’s treatment dates all falling neatly within the period of employment of the accused medics.
Colizzi also asked to see the so-called smoking gun, the glass vial found at one of the nurses’ homes. Libyan technicians had analyzed residue within the vial using a technique called a Western blot, a quick and dirty probe for the presence of particular antibody proteins—in this case, ones that bind to HIV. “They showed their result in the courtroom,” he says, “and it just looked like background noise. It was not a positive result at all.” Even if it had been positive, it would have indicated only that the vials had contained blood from someone exposed to the virus. A far more sensitive test using polymerase chain reaction could prove whether the HIV virus itself was present in the vials. “We offered to do this test, but the court never gave us access to the vials.”
And the claim that the virus was created in a CIA laboratory was “a complete misunderstanding by the Libyans,” according to Colizzi. As is typical of newly isolated HIV viruses from Africa, the sequences did not match any HIV sequence then available on GenBank, the online database of genetic sequences maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The report’s use of the word “recombined,” which in this context refers to naturally occurring recombination of DNA, was taken by the Libyans to mean that the virus was created in the laboratory.
On May 6, 2004, it seemed that the Libyan affair was finally near its end. Colizzi and Montagnier had testified as independent scientific experts, carefully explained the evidence exonerating the medics, and submitted a report that summarized their findings. But then a group of Libyan doctors presented a critique. “It was like a bad joke,” recalls Colizzi. According to Colizzi, the Libyan assessment was riddled with basic misunderstandings of molecular biology. They dismissed (pdf) both Colizzi and Montagnier’s report (pdf) (they said it was unscientific) and the medics’ claim of having been tortured: The medical examination of the victims had not followed “correct procedure” and therefore should not be considered by the court.
To the shock of Colizzi and Montagnier, the judge agreed. Zdravko Georgiev, who had never even worked in the Benghazi hospital, was given a four-year sentence. Since he had already spent that much time in prison, he was to be freed. The five nurses and the intern were to be executed. Crowds of Libyans in the streets outside burst into celebration, chanting for the death of the foreigners.
Late in September 2006, Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Richard Roberts was thumbing through the journal Nature when he read an article by one of their senior reporters, Declan Butler, about a group of foreign medics on death row in Libya. Butler’s article, along with an anonymous editorial entitled “Libya’s Travesty,” described how the medics’ appeals were nearly exhausted. “I had been aware of the situation through the media,” says Roberts, the chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs in Ipswich, Massachusetts. “But the case seemed so open-and-shut, I’d assumed that diplomacy would sort the situation out.” But as the editorial warned, “Diplomacy has lamentably failed to deliver,” and “scientific leaders need to use all their influence” to persuade their governments to take action.
