For eight years, six innocent political prisoners – five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor – have festered in Muammar Gaddafi’s foul Libyan jails. Their ordeal began in 1999, when it emerged that hundreds of children attending the al-Fateh Paediatric Hospital in Benghazi, where the six worked, had been infected with HIV-contaminated blood.

These medics were framed from the word go, pawns in a vile ploy to show that Libya could play the compensation game as well as the lawyers for the Lockerbie victims of Libyan terrorism. Gaddafi cynically accused the West of deliberately spreading HIV-Aids and paraded these “Western” plotters as evidence.

In a protracted legal farce, the six have been twice convicted, and twice sentenced to death, for deliberately infecting 426 children, on the basis of confessions extracted by such conventional Libyan methods as: stubbing cigarettes out on their flesh, rape, sodomy with broom handles, and electric shocks so severe that one nurse was left partly paralysed. The use of torture is not disputed. Libya’s courts acquitted the torturers, but then threw out three defamation suits that the torturers then lodged against their victims, thus implicitly conceding the defendants’ case.

What then of other evidence? It comes down to one word: filth. The Benghazi hospital was a hygiene horror story where contaminated syringes were reused routinely. The Bulgarians’ Libyan defence lawyer said as much in their first trial. So later did Luc Montagnier, the French doctor who first isolated the HIV virus, and who testified that the HIV epidemic predated the arrival of the six. So did the detailed report by international scientists, published a fortnight before the second conviction. It identified and dated the HIV strain involved.

The experts are right, Gaddafi’s minions know it, and so must the children’s families, who have been paid more than $400 million in “blood money”. Why am I so sure? Because Libya’s inhabited margins are filthy. I remember a three-hour battle to force one of Tripoli’s “luxury” hotels to change the sheets and towels not merely of the previous occupant of my room but, by look and smell, of a long procession of previous occupants. The road from Tripoli to the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna runs between ancient olive groves and cerulean sea – and a ribbon of rubbish Libyans have chucked from car windows.

By agreeing to pretend that legal procedures are being followed and contributing to the “blood money” fund, Europe’s politicians have played Gaddafi’s game. His price for letting the six go could yet include dropping the final Lockerbie payment and returning Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, to Libya. It stinks, just as that hospital almost certainly did. And Europe holds its nose.

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