"If we are taken to Djudeida (prison in Tripoli), we will be killed at the door by the prisoners," nurse Valia Cherveniachka said.

"There are places where we were detained in Tripoli which were terrifying. Even here in (the northern city of Benghazi), the parents of children infected (with AIDS) may lynch us," another nurse Valentina Siropolou said.

A third nurse Kristiana Valcheva said she felt like a prisoner "in a horror film."

A Libyan court Thursday sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for spreading AIDS in a children's hospital, sparking fierce international reactions to a verdict that could damage Libya's improving ties with the West.

The accused were convicted of having deliberately infected more than 400 children with the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS by injecting them with tainted blood products. Forty-three of the children have since died.

The defendants were in the court in the northern city of Benghazi when the sentence was handed down in line with a law "which stipulates capital punishment for whoever causes the death of more than one person", a judicial source said.

Libya's Justice Minister Ali al-Hasnawi told AFP the six could appeal to his country's supreme court.

In Sofia, Bulgaria's parliament speaker Ognian Guerdjikov said he was sure the Bulgarians would not be executed.

"I expect that Moamer Kadhafi will behave like a humanitarian in order to win the political influence which he wants to have within the international community," Guerdjikov told Bulgarian state radio.

All the defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges when the trial opened four years ago.

Two of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor said during the trial that they were tortured into making the confessions.

Lawyers for the defendants argued that their clients were being used as scapegoats for inadequate sterilisation of instruments at the pediatric hospital in Benghazi before the health workers arrived in 1998.

TERRA.WIRE