Six inno­cent med­ical pro­fes­sion­als are being held, and expect exe­cu­tion, in Libya. Their crime? “Con­spir­ing with the US and Israel” to infect more than 400 chil­dren with HIV.

Of course there’s no evid­ence. The whole thing is a sham. Inde­pend­ent invest­ig­a­tion has determ­ined the reason for the infec­tion was the gen­eral poor hygiene of Libyan hos­pit­als com­bined with untrained staff (not the six who’ve been incar­cer­ated.) But rather than admit insti­tu­tional short­com­ings, the Libyan author­it­ies prefer to blame some poorly defined inter­na­tional con­spir­acy and execute six inno­cent scapegoats.

This is simply unac­cept­able in the mod­ern world. There is no way the inter­na­tional com­munity should be sit­ting by while this trav­esty of “justice” is car­ried out (and I can’t help feel­ing that if they were Brit­ish or Amer­ican, it wouldn’t be, but who cares about five Bul­gari­ans and a Palestinian?.) But the world has largely for­got­ten these six people, and it’s fallen to (mainly sci­ence) blog­gers to try to get the mes­sage out. Spread the word.