The Bulgarian medics return home
August 24th, 2007
The five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor were freed to leave Libya in the dark hours of Tuesday, 24th Aug, and landed in Sofia around 10.30 am. Krisiyana Valcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova and Ashraf Al-Hadjudj got on the aircraft of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and took off from the Libya airport around 3 am local time. Their relatives, the Bulgarian media, state officials and Sofia citizens gathered at the Sofia Airport to meet the six.
EU’s External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and the French first lady who led the two-day tough talks with Libyan leader Muammar Quadaffi also arrived in Bulgaria.
The medics were allowed to spend their life imprisonment sentences in Bulgaria after Libya demanded Monday stability in its relations with all EU member states. The other demands of the North African country are connected to the guarantees the EU should give concerning the treatment of the HIV infected Libyan children. Besides that, Libya insists on developing some economic projects on its territory. Among them are the constructions of a modern highway, which is to connect the border with Tunis with the Egypt’s one as well as a railway between some Libyan ports and African cities.
The six medical staff, who have been imprisoned since 1999, have been convicted of deliberately infecting 460 children with HIV at the Benghazi hospital and were twice sentenced to death. Last week the Libyan authorities commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, a move many Europeans and Bulgarians believed is a prelude to transferring the medics to Bulgaria.
The medics, who say their confessions were made under duress, were the subject of a high-profile international lobbying campaign. International experts blame the HIV infections on pre-existing hygiene problems at the hospital where the children were affected with the virus.
The decision from the Libyan Supreme Judiciary Council came after the families of the children infected with the HIV virus started to receive compensation. The families had said the same day that they dropped their demand for the death penalty. The same day, July 17, Idris Lagha, the head of the Libyan-based Association for the Families of HIV-Infected Children, said that the victims’ families had received cash compensation.
This was part of a deal organised by the Quaddafi Foundation, a charity which has been involved in mediating a resolution to the case. In return for the money, the relatives have signed a declaration handed over to the Supreme Judiciary Council, saying they no longer insist on the death penalty being carried out.
