TRIPOLI - A Libyan court will deliver verdicts on Tuesday on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of infecting hundreds of children with HIV in a ruling likely to have an impact on Libya's opening to the West.

A Libyan court will deliver verdicts on Tuesday on the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of infecting hundreds of children with HIV in a ruling likely to have an impact on Libya's opening to the West. In this file photo, Palestinian doctor Achraf Hajjouj (C) sits behind bars in a court in Tripoli with Bulgarian nurses on June 13, 2006. [Reuters]

The Tripoli court is expected to free them if they are found innocent, ending their seven years' detention, but could order the death sentence or life in prison if they are found guilty.

The north African country's media has called for a guilty verdict, a decision that would be welcomed in Libya's second city of Benghazi where the infections occurred and where more than 50 of the infected children have died.

"Have no mercy on the killers," said an editorial on the trial on Libyan television's Web site. "It's a big crime."

"How can Western countries be up in arms about freeing the medics? It's as if the children injected the medics with HIV!"

The six are accused of intentionally infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV at a hospital in Benghazi in the late 1990s. The prosecution has demanded the death penalty.

The medics deny the charge. They were convicted in a 2004 trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. But the supreme court quashed the ruling last year and ordered the case be returned to a lower court.

Rights groups the world over have rallied to the medics' defense to stop what they say may be a miscarriage of justice.

"From a legal perspective the trial has been neither fair nor impartial," Emmanuel Altit, a Paris-based lawyer who helps advise the defense team, told Reuters. "The court has refused to hear scientific evidence by leading international experts that counter the prosecution case."

Luc Montagnier, a French doctor who first detected the HIV virus, has said it emerged in the Benghazi hospital in 1997, a year before the medics arrived.

But analysts say freeing the defendants would put the focus on alleged negligence and poor hygiene in Libyan hospitals, which Western scientists say are the real culprits in the case.

The case has hampered oil producer Libya's rapprochement with the West, which moved up a gear when it abandoned its pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in 2003.

Washington backs Bulgaria and the European Union in saying the medics are innocent.

Tripoli has demanded 10 million euros ($13.11 million) for each infected child's family -- "blood money" under which Islamic law lets victims' relatives withdraw death sentences in return for reparations.

Bulgaria and its allies have rejected the idea, saying any payout would be an admission of guilt. But, led by Brussels, they are trying to arrange a fund for training and treatment at European hospitals for the children and their families.