BULGARIA:Bulgarian nurses accused of infecting Libyan children with Aids spent eight years in horrific prison conditions. The low point for Bulgarian nurse Nasya Nenova came when she chewed the veins of her wrists in a desperate attempt to commit suicide.
Dr Ashraf Alhajouj endured the 8½ years in a rough Libyan prison by embroidering and by scratching slogans into the wall of his cell.
Since their flight home from Libya to the Bulgarian capital Sofia last week, the pair, along with four other Bulgarian nurses, have given details in interviews, news conferences and other public accounts that paint an ordeal that was both horrific and tedious. It included torture early on but also evolved with improving conditions, even as death by firing squad loomed overhead.
The six had been convicted and sentenced to death by Libyan courts on charges that they deliberately infected hundreds of Libyan children with the virus that causes Aids.
The health workers are working on regaining their health, overcoming physical and psychological injuries, and are contemplating legal action against their jailers. They also express resentment over how their cases were handled by Bulgarian officials and leaders of Arab governments, who should have been their most vigorous advocates.
"We were treated like animals," Dr Alhajouj (38) said in an interview with a small group of journalists, noting he was initially locked up in a small cell with dogs. "For [ the first] ten months my family didn't know even if I am alive or dead. They were looking all over Libya for me." Dr Alhajouj, a Palestinian who spoke in English and broken Bulgarian, lived most of his life in Libya, unlike the nurses who for the most part arrived in the late 1990s.
He did not know the women before the arrests; what they had in common was work at the same squalid Benghazi hospital where the children became infected. The group came to be friends over the long years of hearings and incarceration, and he learned to speak some Bulgarian.
Dr Alhajouj, Nenova, the nurse, and some of the other former prisoners have given harrowing descriptions of electric shock torture, sleep deprivation, beatings and the use of anaesthesia. It drove Nenova to attempt to kill herself about two months after her arrest by biting the veins in her wrists, according to an account her mother Stanka gave the Bulgarian newspaper Standard.
Their captors told them they would die if they did not confess, several said.
"They told me that if it wasn't me" who infected more than 400 children, "then I must know who did," Nenova said in a news conference. "And throughout all these difficult years I was asking myself, 'why was it me that was chosen to be accused of this evil deed?'"
Libyan authorities, before releasing the six health workers, reduced their death sentences to life in prison. When they were finally flown to Bulgaria after EU and French-brokered talks and controversial payments, the president of Bulgaria pardoned them.
While adjusting to their freedom, several of the former prisoners complained they felt neglected by their government. Days passed before a representative of the Bulgarian government saw them in jail, and he only saw some of them.
The others were held back by their captors because their injuries from torture were visible, the nurses said.
Meetings they had with Bulgarian diplomats were always attended by a Libyan official, making it impossible to reveal the horrors the women were suffering.
More than a year after the arrests, nurse Kristiana Valcheva said, "for the first time I managed to whisper to a representative of the Bulgarian government what had happened to us in the past months".
Dr Alhajouj is especially bitter that the Arab world did not come to his aid and instead seemed to accept without question Libyan authorities' version of events.
Dr Alhajouj was granted Bulgarian citizenship, in part to make it easier for the Bulgarian government to secure his release. In the interview, he said that while he remains proud of his Palestinian heritage, he is more proud to be a Bulgarian, a status that has given him a future and a chance to recover from his ordeal.
"We are holding ourselves, but we are truly injured inside," he said.
"Whatever happened, it will remain in our souls. We cannot forget this, but we will overcome, I think." - (LA Times-Washington Post Service)