Bulgaria wants £35m paid for medics back

Bulgaria will seek to recover funds it donated to Libya as part of a deal to release medics sentenced to death by Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s government, prime minister Boiko Borisov said yesterday.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, convicted of allegedly infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV, were freed in 2007 after an international fund to support the children and their families was set up.

“I have raised the issue to review the agreement with Libya, which to my view was racketeering,” Mr Borisov was quoted as saying by the Bulgarian state news agency.

Bulgaria wrote off £34.9 million in Soviet-era debt owned by Libya as its contribution to the international fund six months after the medics were freed. The medics, who spent 8 years in a Libyan jail, have maintained their innocence and said they were tortured into confessing.

Their death sentences were commuted to life in prison after Libya paid the victims’ families £283m in a settlement arranged by the international fund.

TSVETELIA TSOLOVA