than one person is a fact, but the claims that the defendants were conspiring against the Libyan state are dubious and controversial" The case was then bound over to ordinary criminal court. The People's Court was disbanded in 2005. Second trial The second trial took place in the Benghazi Appeals Court, beginning 8 July 2003. The judges were from Derna, a town neighboring Benghazi. Judges from Tripoli and Benghazi refused to take on the case due to the high level of public sentiment in those cities. Tight security measures were in place. Police officers with submachine guns guarded the venue as relatives of the children gathered in front. The prosecutor stated that the case documents did not reflect the real number of children. The real number of children is 429. A report by prominent AIDS experts Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi was admitted in evidence. Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzito were called to testify in person on behalf of the medics. Professor Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV), testified that the virus in the 393 children studied is a rare type found mostly in West Africa, but also throughout the continent. Montagnier told the court that the outbreak was probably started by an infected child admitted for treatment at the hospital. He said that injection was not the only possible means of infection: Any other manipulation involving penetration of the skin, or even multiple use of the same oxygen mask, could have transmitted the virus. Montagnier was certain that the epidemic at the hospital started about a year before the Bulgarian nurses were hired. He said he was familiar with the case before his first visit to Libya in 1999 because he was in the process of studying the cases of hundreds of HIV-positive children from El-Fatih that were being examined or treated in hospitals in Switzerland, France and Italy. At the time he was working on these cases, some of the children did not yet have the symptoms because the incubation period of the virus is about 10 years. Under cross-examination, Montagnier stated that it is possible to preserve the virus and then reactivate it if it has been held in plasma. It could be kept active for several days, depending on how it is stored. He testified that he was not aware of the existence of the technical capacity in Libya for monitoring this kind