Life

Six Bulgarian medics jailed for life in Libya for infecting children with the AIDS virus were freed on Tuesday, after flying to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. They were being released under a deal brokered between Libya and the European Union, of which Bulgaria is a member.

They had been sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life imprisonment on 17 July. However, the five nurses and one Palestinian-born doctor were pardoned immediately on arrival in Sofia by Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov.

The pardon ends an eight-year ordeal for the six, who always protested their innocence. They say confessions were extracted from them under torture. Foreign experts blamed poor hygiene at the hospital for the HIV infections.

Libya said it ordered their release after it was satisfied the conditions it laid down for extradition had been met. "We received guarantees for the normalisation of relations with European countries, and for a partnership agreement with the European Union," a Libyan official told AFP.

In Brussels, European Commission chief José Manuel Barroso confirmed that a deal on improving ties had been struck in order to secure the medics' release. "I told Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that, if this matter were settled, we would do our best to further normalise these relations," he said.

'Conjecture and supposition'

The medics had been behind bars since February 1999. They were convicted of infecting 438 children with HIV-tainted blood at a hospital in Libya's second city, Benghazi, and sentenced to death in May 2004. Fifty-six of the children have since died.

But foreign health experts have cited poor hygiene as the probable cause of the infections.

Robin Weiss, an AIDS virologist at University College London, UK, said in 2006: "There are no grounds for suspicion of deliberate infection by any staff, and strong evidence of hospital-acquired infection before the arrival, and after the departure, of the Palestinian physician and the Bulgarian nurses."

The journal Nature published a study that concluded a scientific report being used in the case against the six was nothing but conjecture and supposition.

Another journal, Science, published a letter from scientists, including Robert Gallo (who co-discovered that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes AIDS), which stated: "The Libyan court chose to exclude expert testimony from independent scientists, and to prevent access to crucial pieces of evidence to test for HIV contamination."

Million dollar compensation

The families of the infected children have been paid compensation. According to the Gadhafi Foundation, run by Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, and which has been involved in mediating the crisis, the compensation amounts to about $1 million per child.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner had travelled to the Libyan capital Tripoli with Cécilia Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, to help free the medics and flew with them to Sofia.

Ferrero-Waldner signed a two-page deal with Libya, laying out how ties could be boosted, a European source told Reuters. "It covers everything - trade, support for archaeology, illegal immigration, grants for students and visa questions," the source said. A Libyan close to the negotiations said the EU also agreed to help upgrade a hospital in Benghazi.

The EU currently has no bilateral agreements with Libya since imposing sanctions following the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, and has not started negotiations for an accord since UN sanctions were lifted in 2003.

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