Tripoli Six

I ran across a horrifying article about 5 Bulgarian nurses and 1 Palestinian doctor who have been detailed since 1999 in Libya on false charges of infecting 400 children with HIV/AIDS.  The detainees are: Christiana Malinova Valcheva, Valia Georgieva Cherveniashka, Nasia Stoitcheva Nenova, Valentina Manolova Siropulo, Snezhana Ivanova Dimitrova and Ashraf Ahmad Jum’a.

Declan Butler wrote up the case in Nature (2 excerpts from the longer article appear below):

1.  Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them.

and later:

2. If international pressure isn't stronger before the appeal, the risk is large that they will be condemned to death," predicts Michel Taube, co-founder of Together Against the Death Penalty, a French non-governmental organization. "To avoid that outcome, diplomacy is not enough. We need international mobilization."

(photo from CBS news here)
Declan Butler also covered the issue in detail on his blog.

Other info:
Physicians for Human Rights (excellent history/overview, including testimony by Luc Montagnier about the medics' innocence)
Lawyers Without Borders (in French)
Firedoglake

Action Steps:
From DailyKos:  letter writing campaign info