Libya slams Bulgaria over pardoned AIDS medics

Libya slams Bulgaria over pardoned AIDS medics

"The detainees should have been detained upon their arrival (in Sofia), and not freed in this celebratory and illegal manner," Shalgham told reporters in Tripoli.

Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi told the reporters that Bulgaria's actions had violated the legal procedures regarding extradition, as set out in international law and in a 1984 agreement between the two countries.

"We followed the procedure -- it is Bulgaria that betrayed us," Mahmudi said.

Shalgham meanwhile criticised European countries for "joining forces behind the criminals (...) before applauding their liberation." He denounced the "strong European pressure" exerted on Libya.

He also attacked "the humanitarian and international organisations who, instead of criticising the liberation of the criminals, welcomed and greeted this step."

Libya has sent fellow Arab League members a memorandum calling for the group to adopt a common stand on the affair at a meeting of representatives on Monday, said the prime minister.

Tripoli will also seek support from the African Union and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Mahmudi added.

Held in Libya since 1999, the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor with Bulgarian citizenship were sentenced to death after being convicted of deliberately infecting 438 Libyan children with the AIDS-causing HIV virus.

Fifty-six of the children later died.

Libya allowed them to return on Tuesday to Bulgaria, where they had been due to serve life terms in prison, but instead the six were pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov.

The families of the children have criticised Bulgaria's decision, and their representative Idriss Lagha again on Saturday called on Libya's government to request that Interpol rearrest the medics, and for Tripoli to cut all diplomatic ties with Sofia.

The medics were detained in 1999 and allegedly made to confess to deliberately infecting the children with the HIV virus at a hospital in Libya's second city of Benghazi where they worked.

The six were sentenced to death in 2004 on the basis of confessions by the doctor and two of the nurses who later retracted their statements, saying they had been extracted under torture.

The death sentences against the six were commuted to life in prison before the medics were extradited to Bulgaria on Tuesday following an agreement with the European Union for their release.

Under the deal, the victims' families are each to receive one million dollars and the EU normalised its relations with Libya while pledging partnerships in the fields of health, education, border control and the upkeep of the country's many archaeological sites.

Nurses Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valya Cherveniashka, Valentina Siropulo and Kristiana Valcheva and doctor Ashraf Juma Hajuj have always pleaded their innocence, while foreign medical experts blamed the AIDS outbreak on poor hygiene at the hospital predating their employment.

Since their release, the medics have spoken out about their eight-year ordeal.

"All of us were treated like animals... we were tortured for a long time, with electricity, beatings, deprivation of sleep" and drugs, Hajuj said in an interview on Thursday.

In Europe meanwhile, German politicians continued to criticise the memorandum between Paris and Tripoli to build a nuclear reactor in Libya, which was signed just a day after the release of the Bulgarian medics.

The critics objected to the deal to build a nuclear reactor for a water desalination plant on grounds of nuclear non-proliferation, for environmental reasons and because of the way it bypassed the European Union.

The deal was "a bitter pill for the EU," said Ruprecht Polenz, conservative head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag, in the newspaper Tagesspiegel am Sonntag.

It would weaken the European Union's ability to take action in foreign politics, he added.

German Eurodeputy Elmar Brok, in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, called on France to consult with the EU, Germany and the International Atomic Energy Agency before finalising the deal.