Pleas grow for condemned nurses

LIBYA : Ireland has been urged to help five Bulgarian women facing execution in Libya, writes Daniel McLaughlin

LIBYA: Ireland has been urged to help five Bulgarian women facing execution in Libya, writes Daniel McLaughlin

The husband of one of five Bulgarian nurses facing execution in Libya for infecting 426 children with HIV has urged Ireland to do its utmost to help free the women, ahead of the Bulgarian president's arrival in Dublin on a state visit.

The nurses and a Palestinian doctor were condemned to death in May 2004 for intentionally infecting the children with HIV-tainted blood, despite international objections and claims that their confessions were elicited through torture.

After being jailed on lesser charges which he disputes, Zdravko Georgiev was released last year but is still barred from leaving Libya, while his wife Kristiana Valcheva and her colleagues await their fate in a Tripoli jail. "Everyone knows they are innocent and they are very, very tired after almost seven years in prison," Dr Georgiev told The Irish Times by telephone from Tripoli, where he has lived in the Bulgarian embassy since his release from prison.

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"My message to your president, to my president and all EU leaders is this - I understand the problems involved, but time is passing and please, as soon as possible, let's finally finish this."

Officials from the EU are believed to be formulating a deal with Libya that would allow the medics to go home while sparing Col Muammar Gadafy the embarrassment of admitting that his law courts and hospitals have made egregious mistakes.

Libyan officials have suggested that the payment of "blood money" could win the nurses' release, but Bulgaria says such a solution would be a tacit admission of their guilt.

International HIV experts blame the Benghazi hospital outbreak on poor hygiene practices, while human rights groups say the medics were subjected to electric shocks to their tongues, breasts and genitals, and forced to sign confessions in Arabic.

The plight of the women is expected to be discussed when Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov meets the Taoiseach and President Mary McAleese on Monday and Tuesday.

But Dr Georgiev is tired of hearing words of support from faraway politicians.

"Everyone says they are trying everything - prime ministers and presidents - but nothing happens. [ The nurses] have no optimism. After nearly seven years in prison they have no reason for it."

In February 1999, Dr Georgiev received a call from friends urging him to return to Benghazi from a job in the Libyan desert, because Kristiana had disappeared. He finally found her in Tripoli, in a facility reserved for those accused of the gravest crimes.

"He called his brother," recalls Dr Georgiev's son, Marian. "He told him lots of the nurses had been arrested and something very scary was happening. Then the line went dead."

For the trouble of tracking down his wife, Dr Georgiev was jailed for currency offences, and has been denied an exit visa since his release last May.

"My father didn't see the sun for 800 days," Marian recalled in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.

"And for two years, Libya said the nurses were being kept in a hotel as witnesses in a case. Actually, they were in jail being tortured; they used electricity, hung them up as if crucified, used dogs, cigarette butts and horrible insects."

Libya initially accused the women of involvement in a CIA and Mossad plot to undermine the state, but now suggests they infected the children as part of a macabre medical experiment.

While the US and EU says the case endangers a rapprochement with Libya, Col Gadafy risks enraging the hostile city of Benghazi if he frees the women. He is also believed to be under pressure from his security forces to swap them for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the agent jailed in Britain for the 1988 Lockerbie aircraft bombing.

"You cannot exchange five innocents for one guilty man," says Velislava Dareva, a journalist and former dissident who campaigns for their release.

"If the nurses were American or British there would be no such case, and they would be free and at home. But the fact is they are Bulgarian. That is the truth, and a bad truth."