A Libyan court has dismissed defamation charges against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who have been condemned to death in a separate trial for infecting Libyan children with HIV.
The defendants were accused of criminally defaming three Libyan police officers and a doctor by accusing them of using torture to secure confessions.
Prosecutors had sought up to six years in jail, and the plaintiffs had demanded millions of dollars in compensation.
A lawyer for the four Libyans has said he will be filing an appeal within 10 days.
The accusations referred to testimony by the foreign medical staff alleging that they had been tortured during investigations into whether they had deliberately infected Libyan children with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The confessions they say they gave under torture were a key pillar of their convictions last year, when they were sentenced to death for exposing hundreds of children to HIV in a hospital in Benghazi in the late 1990s.
That trial drew sharp international condemnation, and the United States, the European Union and Bulgaria all protested the innocence of the medical workers.
Libya has remained defiant under international pressure to free the nurses. But leader Muammar Gaddafi's son and envoy Saif al-Islam has said the six will not be executed.
The nurses and the doctor are appealing to the Supreme Court against their conviction. No date has been set for a hearing.
