HIV Trial in Libya - Timeline

Timeline

• 27 January 2007: The Bulgarian newspaper 24 Часа reports that Gaddafi's elder son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi expressed hope that the death sentence could be halted and that "a satisfactory solution could be found."

• 15 February 2007: Dimitar Ignatov, a 25-year-old US citizen with Bulgarian origins, who launched two phony web pages for gathering money in support of Libya-jailed nurses, was arrested in a joint raid conducted by policemen from both countries. The money obtained in the scam had gone to his personal account in a Chicago bank.

• 17 February 2007: Lawyer Hari Haralampiev told Darik News that this was the last possible deadline for appealing the sentence before the Supreme Cassation Court of Libya. The court will have to hold the first hearing on the appeal within two months. The court's decision on the case will be the final one in the trial. The Supreme Court may reconfirm or waive the sentences. If they decide to nod the death sentences, then the case would go to the Supreme Court Council where the sentences can be either confirmed, changed or abolished.

• 21 February 2007: Another "entrepreneur" decides to cash in on the "You Are Not Alone" campaign. A One-Lev shop in the southwestern town of Blagoevgrad has started selling the ribbons, despite the fact that they have only been distributed for free since the beginning of the campaign.

• 25 February 2007: The nurses and medic plead innocent to charges of slandering Libyan officers Djuma Misheri and Madjit Shol at a hearing in Criminal Court in Tripoli. The nurses once again pointed them out as their torturers on 1999. They told the court, "Everything that the two officers claim is a contemptible lie," and showed the scars the men left on their bodies. The prosecutor demanded the maximum three-year prison sentence for the nurses in the slander case.

• 28 February 2007: Libyan authorities appeal the court's decision to acquit Bulgarian doctor Zdravko Georgiev.

• 9 March 2007: Bulgarian media quote Libyan Foreign Affairs Committee Secretary Suleiman Shahoumi as saying in Libya's General People's Congress that the medics would not be executed even if the court upheld their sentence.

• 15 March 2007: Tottenham Hotspur and Bulgarian international footballer, Dimitar Berbatov, says he will wear a "You Are Not Alone" armband during Spurs' matches.

• 16 March 2007: Bulgarian journalist Georgi Gotev proposes that Bulgarian parties and voters co-operate to elect the nurses as Bulgaria's representatives to the European Parliament to pressure both Libya and the EU.

• 27 May 2007: The prisoners were acquitted of slandering Libyan police officers when they said they were tortured.

• 17 July 2007: The Benghazi International Fund had started handing out to families the US $1 million per affected child that would spare the medics' lives, BBC Tripoli correspondent Rana Jawad reported.

• 17 July 2007: Libya commutes death sentences to life imprisonment.

• 24 July 2007: Libya extradited all of the Medics.

AP Story

• 24 July 2007: Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the six medics 45 minutes after they touched down on home soil at Sofia's international airport. "Certain of their innocence, in accordance with the powers vested in him, President Parvanov pardons the medics," foreign minister Ivailo Kalfin said after welcoming the medics back.

• 28 July 2007: Libyan officials said they had sent a memo to the Arab League calling for action against Sofia – and a protest to the EU – because Bulgaria's decision to pardon the medics has angered Tripoli. The BBC reported that the Libyan authorities had expected the freed medics to serve their life terms in Bulgarian jails, Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi said, adding that the deal to free the medics had involved money put up by the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Qatar, while France had promised to provide equipment for the Benghazi hospital, where the infections had taken place – and training for Libyan medical staff over five years.

• 10 August 2007, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the leader of Libya, admitted that the confessions were extracted through torture with electric shocks and threats targeted at the medic's families, and confirmed that some of the children had been infected with HIV before the medics arrived in Libya. He said that the guilty verdict of the Libyan courts had been based on "conflicting reports", and said that

"There is negligence, there is a disaster that took place, there is a tragedy, but it was not deliberate."

• 24 February 2011, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Libya's newly resigned Minister of Justice, told Al Jazeera that the responsibility for the HIV infection lay totally with Muammar Gaddafi's regime.