Takeshi Abe, 87, acquitted in 2001 of negligence for ordering the use of unheated blood-clotting agents for a haemophiliac who later developed AIDS and died in 1991, was declared mentally unfit to stand trial in the appeal.

"The defendant is in a severe state of dementia," judge Yoshimasa Kawabe said.

Victims' groups were outraged at the end of a case which is at the center of a tainted blood scandal that infected some 1,430 people with Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) between the late 1970s and 1986, of whom more than 500 have died.

Former lawmaker Etsuko Kawada, 55, whose son is among those infected and still alive, said she was disappointed the trial failed to bring out the truth, pointing out that Abe had never testified in his own defense.

"The defendant has refused to answer questions and has finally escaped without speaking at all," she was quoted by Jiji Press as saying. "I cannot be convinced by a trial that ends before making the truth known."

If Abe does not recover, the case will forever remain in limbo, with Abe neither cleared of wrongdoing nor convicted, a court official said.

The Tokyo District Court ruled in March 2001 it was unlikely Abe could have foreseen the fatal outcome, and that many other doctors were also prescribing the use of unheated blood products at the time.

Abe, former head of the health and welfare ministry's AIDS study group set up in 1983, pleaded not guilty when the trial opened in March 1997.

Prosecutors said Abe ordered the use of unheated blood products despite knowing since at least November 1984 they could be tainted with HIV.

Use of unheated blood products was finally banned in December 1986 because of the risk of HIV transmission.

The scandal erupted in 1989 when haemophilia patients sued the government and drug companies including Green Cross Corp., now Mitsubishi Pharma Corp., which used to be Japan's top supplier of blood products.

Former health ministry official Akihito Matsumura was given a one-year suspended jail term in 2001 over the death from AIDS contracted from contaminated blood of two haemophiliac and liver patients, but has appealed to the High Court.

Three former Green Cross executives, given jail terms ranging from 14 months to three years for professional negligence, have appealed to the Supreme Court.

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