HIV Trial in Libya - Development of Media Coverage

Development of Media Coverage

In Libya, "La" magazine (issue 78) published its exposé about AIDS at the hospital, but was shut down. Initial Bulgarian coverage focused on a scandal in the wake of the arrests when the Bulgarian news journal "24 hours" of 24 February published an investigation of money laundering at Expomed entitled "How we lost USD 5,048,292 in Libya". The trial received almost no public attention outside Libya and Bulgaria until an account by Eric Favereau was published in the French paper Libération on 2 June 2000 entitled "Libye : Six Bulgares accusés d’être à l’origine de 393 cas de sida Assassins d’enfants ou boucs émissaires de la Libye ? " (Libya: six Bulgarians accused of causing 392 Aids cases - Child killers or Libya's Scapegoats?). Libya had requested help and France, Italy and Switzerland had received some of the sick children. Eighty children were sent to France in May 1999. The Swiss paper Neue Zuercher Zeitung followed with the article “Bulgarians as Scapegoats” and the Washington Times picked up the story. In April 2001 the trial gained brief attention after Muammar Gaddafi gave his speech at the African summit on HIV/AIDS implicating the CIA. Cold War era GRU defector Viktor Suvorov would claim on Radio Free Europe that the conspiracy theory espoused by Gaddafi about CIA creating HIV and letting it loose in Africa had been invented by the KGB and was still promoted by Russian secret services, who were controlling Libya. This theory was widely published throughout the Balkans in Serbian and Greek newspaper articles. On 2 July 2001 the Washington Post ran a story by Peter Finn, interviewing Prof. Luc Perrin. Perrin dismissed the allegations of a deliberate infection, and WHO spokesperson Melinda Henry told the Post that members of WHO missions in Libya in 1998 and 1999 felt that further study was necessary, but they “were not invited back.”

The case continued to receive minor attention until the conclusion of the second trial and the imposition of the death penalty on 6 May 2004, which provoked a major reaction, and worldwide television coverage.