Mick Hartley

As the case of the Benghazi Six builds to what many hope will be a resolution involving some kind of financial settlement, it’s at last beginning to receive the media attention it merits. Here the BBC profile the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian trainee doctor (given Bulgarian citizenship last month) who’ve been held in jail in Libya for over six years, tortured to sign confessions, and who are still under sentence of death despite testimony from leading scientists that they couldn’t possibly be guilty of the the crimes they’re accused of.

Nasya Nenova, for instance:

She arrived in Libya in 1998 and started working at the al-Fateh. She was arrested just when she was preparing to return to Bulgaria.

During the investigation, she signed confessions, in which she stated that she had deliberately infected Libyan children in order to receive money.

At a court hearing in June 2001, Mrs Nenova and co-accused Kristina Vulcheva withdrew their testimony, explaining that they had been coerced by torture to confess to offences they had not committed.

Mrs Nenova told her husband Ivan later that she had been beaten with a cable on her hands and feet. As a result she said she could not walk for a week. A month later, she says she was subjected to electric shocks and threatened to be infected with HIV if she did not confess.

After three months in jail, she tried to commit suicide. Asked by a judge whether her suicide attempt was a result of a guilty conscience, she replied that she had tried to end her life because she could not bear to be tortured.