The United Nations human rights office on Tuesday called on Libyan authorities not to execute five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, saying it had concerns about the fairness of their trial on charges of deliberately infecting children with the deadly HIV virus.

"The circumstances surrounding the application of the death penalty in the case of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian physician could constitute a violation of international human rights law," U.N. human rights spokesman Jose Luis Diaz said. After a seven-month retrial, a Libyan court on Tuesday sentenced the nurses and doctor to death for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with the HIV virus that causes the killer disease AIDS.

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, had "very serious and credible concerns about the fairness of the trial", Diaz said in Geneva.

The defendants' right to appeal must be respected fully "with the hope that errors can be rectified and that the defendants are afforded full due process rights", he said. "In any case, we urge the authorities not to carry out the death sentences, even if they are confirmed on appeal," Diaz said.

The tragedy of the children infected with HIV "must not be compounded with a possible miscarriage of justice and an irreversible punishment," he added. The six deny infecting 426 children, more than 50 of whom have since died, with HIV at the hospital in the town of Benghazi in the late 1990s. The defendants were first found guilty in a 2004 trial and sentenced to death by firing squad.

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