UNITED NATIONS (AP) | 12/23/2006 10:03 PM

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday he was ”deeply concerned” about a Libyan court’s decision to reimpose death sentences on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting children with HIV.

Annan offered U.N. support for the children and for efforts to ”find a humane solution for the fate of the medics.”

”I am deeply concerned by confirmation of a guilty verdict and a death sentence,” Annan said.

President Bush and European leaders have expressed outrage over the death sentences, imposed despite scientific evidence the children were infected with the virus before the medical workers came to Libya.

The defendants were convicted and sentenced to death a year ago on charges that they intentionally spread HIV to more tha n 400 children at a hospital in Benghazi. Libya’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial after an international outcry.

A French doctor testified at the first trial that strains of HIV were circulating at the hospital well before the nurses and doctor arrived in March 1998.

On Dec. 6, the journal Nature published an analysis of viral strains from some of the children, showing changes in the virus proved it was contracted at least three years before the defendants arrived at the hospital.

The case has hurt Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s recent efforts to improve his country’s relationship with the West, but has not stopped the rapprochement entirely. This summer, the United States reopened its embassy in Tripoli, 16 years after it severed ties with the country.

Annan, whose tenure ends on Dec. 31, praised the international community for providing treatment and medicine to the infected children. Fifty children have died, and the rest have been treated in Euro pe.

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