Details Announced
July 28, 2007
"The detainees should have been detained upon their arrival [in Sofia], and not freed in this celebratory and illegal manner," Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgham said Saturday at a news conference in Tripoli.
Bulgaria's actions "violated the legal procedures regarding extradition, as set down under international law and in the agreement on judicial cooperation signed between the two countries" in 1984, added Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi. "We followed the procedure -- it is Bulgaria that betrayed us."
Mahmundi also said that French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed similar dissatisfaction with the Bulgarian decision to pardon the medics when he made a trip to Libya this week.
Shalgham also criticized "humanitarian and international organisations who, instead of criticising the liberation of the criminals, welcomed and greeted this step."
Main fund sponsors announced
At the same press conference, Mahmudi said the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Qatar were the main donors to a fund set up to pay hundreds of families of children who contracted the HIV virus at a Libyan hospital in the 1990s. He also said that France had pledged to train some 50 Libyan doctors.
Bulgaria contributed to the fund through a non-governmental organisation open to private Bulgarian and foreign companies, Deputy Foreign Minister Feim Chaushev told Reuters.
"One of the options for Bulgaria's contribution to the fund is forgiving the Libyan debt," Chaushev added. "We are to decide on that option. We are discussing other options as well, such as technical assistance."
The six Bulgarian medics were detained in 1999 and later found guilty and sentenced to death by Libyan courts of intentionally infecting 438 children with the AIDS causing HIV virus. Fifty six of the children have died.
The medics, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who has been given Bulgarian citizenship, maintained their innocence. Foreign health experts have said poor sanitary conditions in Libya's hospitals were to blame for the spread of the disease among patients.
Libya calls for international protest
As a protest to Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov's pardon, Libya called on Arab League members to adopt a common stand on the affair at a meeting of representatives on Monday, the prime minister said. Tripoli will also seek support from the African Union and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Mahmudi added.
Libya allowed the medics to return to Bulgaria on Tuesday, where they had been due to serve life terms in prison. Since their release the medics have said their confessions were extracted under torture.
"All of us were treated like animals," the doctor Ashraf Juma Hajuj said Thursday. "We were tortured for a long time, with electricity, beatings, deprivation of sleep."
The families of the deceased and HIV-positive children have criticised Bulgaria's decision, and their representative Idriss Lagha again on Saturday called on Libya's government to request that Interpol arrest the medics again, and for Tripoli to cut all diplomatic ties with Sofia.
Bulgaria, however, said it wants to close this chapter of relations with Libya and move on.
"The most important thing is to restore our relations with Libya because in the last eight years they have stalled in the medics' case," Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin told Darik radio.