Libyan 'torturers' should face trial say freed medics

Bulgarian nurses freed by Libya this week after more than eight years want legal action to be taken against the people they say tortured them while they were held in prison.

“We can forgive, but we cannot forget what has happened to us,” Nasya Nenova, one of the six medics, told a news conference.

Kristiana Valcheva, Nasya Nenova and Ashraf al Hazouz said they were ready to testify in an investigation into 11 Libyan police officers, which Bulgaria started last January for alleged torture of the medics.

Libya had accused the six of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV; 50 of the children died. The medics, jailed since 1999, were initially sentenced to death, but later had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. They deny the charge and say their confessions were extracted under torture.

Speaking yesterday at their first press conference after returning home, the medics said they could forgive those who tortured them but said they wanted them tried.

“I could forgive those who tortured us because they were tools in the hands of others who issued the orders,” said Valcheva.

Recalling the first months in prison, Nenova said “it was horrifying.”

“They tortured us, they did not allow us to have a lawyer. It was only after 13 months that we could meet with our lawyer and try to whisper what they were doing to us.”

The Libyans will be investigated for allegedly using coercion, torture and threats – between February and May 1999 – to extract false confessions from the medics, which subsequently led to their death sentences, prosecutor Nikolai Kokinov says.

There has been no indication Libya would allow the officers to travel to Bulgaria to take part in any trial.

The medics were sentenced to death twice – in 2004 and again in 2006, following a Supreme Court appeal. The death sentences were based on the nurses’ alleged confessions, but some of the nurses say they are innocent and were beaten and tortured to admit guilt.

In 2005, the nurses had filed lawsuits for torture against 10 Libyan officers, but the charges were rejected by a Libyan court.

Yesterday, only three of the six medics attend the news conference. A doctor who was accompanying them said the other could not come because of post-traumatic stress.

The medics received an emotional welcome on Tuesday from family members, government officials and hundreds of ordinary Bulgarians. They were immediately granted a presidential pardon.

The five nurses – all mothers – travelled to Libya nearly a decade ago, attracted by promises of higher paying jobs. They were sent through a Bulgarian recruitment agency to al-Fath Children’s Hospital in Libya’s second-largest city of Benghazi. They were arrested the year after their arrival.

Prime minister Sergei Stanishev said Bulgaria may write off Libya’s foreign debt to the country as part of humanitarian aid measures.

Cancelling the £27 million debt would not be payback for the release of the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor, Stanishev said.

It should not be viewed “as paying ransom, or admitting (the medical workers’) guilt, but rather as a humanitarian gesture,” he said.

Libya’s decision to allow the six to return to Bulgaria – nominally to serve out the rest of their life sentences – came after months of pressure from the US and the EU, who made clear to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that resolving the issue was key to normalising relations, a key Libyan goal.

Behind Tuesday’s dramatic release were secretive negotiations, with the French president’s wife as a key protagonist.

Bulgarian foreign minister Ivailo Kalfin told journalists that the last 48 hours were the most dramatic in the release efforts.

“At 2am on Tuesday, just hours before their departure, Mrs Cecilia Sarkozy threatened to break off the negotiations and leave Tripoli,” Kalfin said, adding that this was the decisive moment in the medics’ release.