Six foreign medics convicted of infecting Libyan children with HIV were freed on Tuesday after a “full 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 lifts a barrier to attempts by the long-isolated north African state to complete a process of normalising ties with the West.
Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor who recently took Bulgarian citizenship after their arrival in Sofia on a French jet. The medics said they were innocent and had been tortured to confess.
“I know I am free, I know I am on Bulgarian land, 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.
“They woke us up at 4 am and at 5.45 we left the gate of the prison and boarded the French plane. I am in such a state that I still cannot feel anything.”
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 normalising our relations with Libya. Our relations with Libya were in a large extent blocked by the non-settlement 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”.
Bulgaria and its allies in Brussels and Washington had suggested that not freeing the nurses would hurt Libya’s efforts to emerge from decades of diplomatic isolation imposed for what the West called its support of terrorism.
EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner travelled to Tripoli with Cecilia Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, to help free the medics and flew with them to Sofia. She signed a two-page deal with Libya, laying out how ties could be boosted, a European source said.
