Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, convicted for allegedly infecting over 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus, were freed in 2007 after the international community set up a fund to support the HIV/AIDS victims and their families.

“I have raised the issue to review the agreement with Libya for the return of the medics, which to my view was racketeering,” Borisov was quoted as saying by the Bulgarian state news agency.

“We saw the deal as a success at the time, because the nurses came home alive... but the price for Bulgaria was enormous,” he said a day after he returned from an international meeting with Libya’s National Transitional Council in Paris.

Bulgaria wrote off $56.6 million in Soviet-era debt owned by Libya as its contribution to the international fund six months after the medics were freed. Borisov now said Bulgaria will seek to get the funds back.

The medics, who spent eight years in a Libyan jail, have maintained their innocence and said they were tortured into confessing.

Their death sentences were commuted to life in prison after Libya paid the victims’ families $460 million in a settlement arranged by the international fund. The Balkan country’s president pardoned the six upon their arrival.

Bulgaria, a European Union member, has recognized the National Transitional Council as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people and has pledged to help the new authorities rebuild the North African country after 42 years of maverick Qaddafi dictatorship and six months of civil war.