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WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States promised Friday to do all it can to persuade Libya to free five Bulgarian nurses convicted of and sentenced to death for injecting the virus that causes AIDS into 400 children. International observers said the charges were contrived and extracted by torture.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Pasi that the Bush administration would "do everything possible, everything within our power, to obtain the release of these prisoners who have been in Libyan prisons for much too long and without justification," department spokesman Adam Ereli said.
The nurses and a Palestinian physician were convicted a little over a year ago despite trial testimony from Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French co-discoverer of the AIDS virus HIV, that the children were infected in 1997, a year before the nurses arrived and began work in Libya.
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