Five nurses who travelled to Libya to care for sick children were facing death by firing squad last night after being found guilty of deliberately infecting 426 young patients with HIV.

Their conviction, after seven years in jail and two trials, prompted an international outcry and raised the stakes for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as he tries to regain favour with Europe and the US.

Legal appeals are expected to lead to fresh diplomatic negotiations aimed at a face-saving arrangement for the Libyan leader, who faces domestic pressure for vengeance against an alleged foreign plot to infect children with the virus.

The five Bulgarian women wept as Judge Mahmoud Haouissa pronounced the sentences at the end of a trial that was condemned by scientists, Western governments and human rights organisations.

Ashraf Alhajouj, a Palestinian doctor in his late thirties who received the same sentence, sat impassively behind the bars of the dock. “The verdict doesn’t change anything. We are still innocent,” he said.

The court also ordered the Libyan State to pay the families between $250,000 (£127,000) and $900,000 for each victim. The defendants’ lawyer said that they would appeal.

Aids experts and 114 Nobel prizewinners had called for the swift release of the medical workers. However, relatives of the infected children were delighted. Families celebrated by dancing outside the court. “We are happy,” said Subhy Abdullah, whose daughter Mona, 7, died of Aids contracted at al-Fateh Children’s Hospital in Benghazi.

The death of an eight-year-old boy this week brought to 53 the total of deaths in an epidemic that is seen in Benghazi as a plot to kill Muslims.

However, Ali al-Hasnawi, the Justice Minister, said that there could be “a complete revision of the case”, which had already been tried once before and rejected on appeal. Diplomats see the sentences as a prelude to new contacts between Colonel Gaddafi and Western governments who are keen to keep his country within their fold. Last year the European Union opened the way to a compromise over the affair with a Benghazi action plan. This sent European doctors to the Mediterranean city to provide training and advice in setting up an HIV treatment centre. Most of the surviving children are being treated in hospitals in France and Italy at Colonel Gaddafi’s expense.

The six were part of a larger group of volunteers who went to al-Fateh hospital in 1998. In that year 426 children were confirmed as being HIV-positive. The following year, 19 of the foreigners were arrested, but 13 were later released.

In May 2004 the remaining six — Christiana Valcheva, Dr Alhajouj, Snezhana Dimitrova, 54, Alia Cherveniashka, 51, Nasya Nenova, 40 and Valentina Siropoulo, 47 — were sentenced to death by firing squad for “undermining the security of the State”.

The court ignored testimony from Professor Luc Montagnier — the French doctor who was a co-discoverer of HIV — that the virus was active in the hospital before the nurses began their contracts there.

Colonel Gaddafi fomented anti-foreigner feeling, saying that the CIA or the Israeli Mossad had designed a strain of killer virus and given it to the medical staff to experiment on Libyan children. Now the colonel is seen by experts as using the Benghazi Six as a pawn in his discussions over oil, arms and aircraft, and Middle Eastern diplomacy.

Twists and turns for the Benghazi Six

February 1999 19 Bulgarian health workers arrested on suspicion of spreading HIV

2000 Five Bulgarian nurses and two doctors — one Bulgarian, one Palestinian — go on trial

2001 Court calls for the death sentence

2002 Three of the accused retract confessions, saying they were given under duress

2003 French specialists testify that HIV was caused by poor hygiene

2004 Nurses and Palestinian doctor sentenced to death; Bulgarian doctor sentenced to four years in jail for currency smuggling. Bulgaria rejects Libyan offer to drop the case in exchange for $10 million for each infected child

2005 Ten Libyan officers accused of torturing the health workers acquitted

Source: agencies