While the Gadhafi Foundation has said it was brokering an agreement with the children’s families to resolve the case, there have been continuing signals that the families would not easily be placated. “We are awaiting the execution of the death sentence,” the families’ lawyer, Al-Monseif Khalifa, said in Tripoli today, according to Reuters, which noted that members of 20 of the families demonstrated outside the court.

Analysts said that part of the problem was that Mr. Gadhafi is not popular in Benghazi, analysts said, and his government may not feel that it is in a position to reverse a death sentence that is widely viewed as just and proper there.

The convoluted case began nearly a decade ago, in 1998, before Bulgaria was a member of the European Union and before Mr. Gadhafi renounced terrorism. At a time of economic upheaval and rapid inflation in Bulgaria, the five nurses, who were then in their late 30s and 40s, signed contracts to work at Benghazi Children’s Hospital for mundane reasons: to buy an apartment or to put a daughter through college. The Palestinian doctor had grown up in Libya.

The six were arrested in 1999. In the initial indictment, which reads like a spy novel, Libyan prosecutors claimed that the nurses intentionally infected the children as part of a plot by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to undermine the Libyan state. Prosecutors claimed that the nurses confessed to the crime, and that investigators had found vials of tainted blood in one of the nurses’ rooms. For their part, the nurses said they were tortured and raped while in custody, in order to extract confessions from them.

In 2001, two of the world’s foremost AIDS experts, Dr. Luc Montagnier of France and Dr. Vittorio Colizzi of Italy, were invited by the Gadhafi Foundation to study the evidence and were granted wide access to the hospital. They concluded that poor sanitary practices — such as the transfusion of unsafe blood products — had led to the spread of the AIDS virus, and added that medical records indicated that some of the children had AIDS before the accused nurses arrived in Libya. Libyan authorities refused to provide the scientists with the vial of blood used in evidence.

Last year, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a petition asking Libya to release the nurses and the doctor. The petition was delivered by hand to Moammar Gaddafi.

Reached by phone today, several member of the group said they had agreed not to discuss the case until later this week, or until there was a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Council.

Dr. Colizzi, who has visited the hospital in Benghazi several times over the last few years to help develop treatment programs there, said today, “I think all we can say for now it that this is incredible, really incredible.”