Libya offers deal to release nurses

LIBYA: Libya has proposed swapping five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death for infecting hundreds of children with HIV for a Libyan intelligence officer jailed in Britain for the Lockerbie airliner bombing, Sofia's former foreign minister has revealed.

Libya's Supreme Court postponed a ruling this week on the nurses' appeal against a 2004 conviction for injecting 426 children with HIV-tainted blood, a charge the medics vehemently deny and the European Union and United States have denounced.

Now EU diplomats are searching for a way to secure the release of the nurses - and a Palestinian doctor convicted alongside them - without appearing to admit their guilt or forcing Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy into a humiliating public climbdown.

Solomon Passy, Bulgaria's foreign minister from 2001 until last August, said Libya had suggested exchanging the nurses for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who is serving a life sentence in a Glasgow jail for the 1988 bombing of a PanAm plane over the village of Lockerbie, killing 270 people.

"This was proposed by the Libyan side during my term as foreign minister" Mr Passy told Bulgarian television.

"They had asked me to start talks with my British counterpart Jack Straw over the possibility of such an arrangement - to exchange our nurses for their man, Megrahi." Mr Passy said he rejected the deal, and his successor has taken the same line.

Experts on the Arab world say a compromise is likely, with Libya freeing the nurses in return for EU aid for relatives of the HIV-infected children.

President Bush and senior EU officials have warned Col Gadafy that a rapprochement with the West would be impossible if the nurses were executed.

But simply releasing the women - two of whom reportedly claim to have been raped in jail - would incur the wrath of the sick children's relatives in the restive city of Benghazi, and open up Libya's law courts and health system to international ridicule.

A Bulgarian analyst on Arab affairs, Boyan Chukov said Libya's powerful security services want to use the case to bring home the jailed al-Megrahi.

"In the extremely complicated political situation Gadafy is facing, it is important for him to have loyal power structures and they are very attentive as to what will happen to their fellow officer," he said.

While western powers complain that the nurses have been tortured, and Aids experts say the Benghazi hospital outbreak started before the nurses arrived and was probably caused by poor hygiene, the victims and their relatives refuse to be pacified.

"I don't want them to be executed but to be injected by the Aids virus themselves," said Souad (18), who claimed the nurses infected her with HIV.