SOFIA, 25 July 2007 — Six foreign medics convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV were freed yesterday after a partnership deal between Tripoli and the European Union ended their eight-year ordeal.
Their return to Bulgaria ends what Libya’s critics called a human rights scandal and lets the long-isolated North African state complete a process of normalizing its ties with the West.
Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor who recently took Bulgarian citizenship after they arrived in Sofia on a French jet. The medics have always said they were innocent and had been tortured to confess.
“I know I am free, I know I am on Bulgarian soil, but I still cannot believe it,” 48-year-old nurse Christiana Valcheva said as the medics and their families wept and hugged each other at the airport. The Bulgarian nurses were flown to Sofia after the EU, which Bulgaria joined in January, agreed a last-minute breakthrough deal with Libya on medical aid and political ties.
“We hope to go on further normalizing our relations with Libya. Our relations with Libya were in a large extent blocked by the nonsettlement of this medics issue,” EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.
Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgam said the deal had opened the way to “full cooperation and partnership between Libya and the European Union.”
Shalgam said the deal involved EU support and assistance for the more than 400 infected children in European hospitals for the rest of their lives.
It also provides for the rehabilitation of two hospitals and a medical center in Benghazi, the eastern Libyan city where the HIV outbreak occurred. The EU also offered assistance to Libya in education, archaeology and stemming illegal migration. EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner traveled to Tripoli with Cecilia Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, to help free the medics and flew with them to Sofia. She signed the deal with Libya, a European source said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy said neither the European Union nor France paid money to Libya for the release of the medics. However, he said Qatar mediated in the release. Sarkozy said a feeling of solidarity with the nurses spurred him to push for their liberation. “The nurses, in my heart, were French,” he said. “They were French because they were unjustly accused and because they suffered and because we had to get them out of there.”
To a question whether money was paid, Sarkozy said he wished to thank the authorities in Qatar for their “mediation and their humanitarian intervention.”
