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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

10 years on, Bulgarian nurses leave Libya ordeal behind

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Vessela Sergueva -


Bulgarian nurse Valentina Siropoulo was once condemned to death in Moamer Kadhafi’s Libya. Ten years after she and four colleagues were released and allowed home, appreciation of their freedom overwhelms memories of their harrowing ordeal.


“My busy day-to-day life lets me forget the abuse. I have learnt to better appreciate my health, my freedom, my family,” says the 58-year old.


She has resumed her work at the hospital in Pazardjik, a small town in southern Bulgaria.


The five nurses were jailed in 1999, along with a Palestinian doctor, for allegedly infecting over 400 children with HIV-tainted blood at a paediatric hospital in the eastern city of Benghazi. They were tortured while in detention and twice sentenced to death.


Tripoli only agreed to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment in 2007, after which they were flown back to Bulgaria.


“I was abducted one evening in 1999,” Siropoulo recalls with a shudder.


“Men taped up my mouth, then tortured me for months, with electric shocks, batons and threats of being attacked by dogs.”


She had enjoyed the work on a paediatric ward, where she was much better paid than back home.


But the foreign medics were held responsible for tainted blood transfusions and accused of deliberately infecting 438 children with HIV.


Their saviour came in the form of Cecilia Sarkozy, wife of the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who visited Libya twice in July 2007 for talks with Kadhafi.


“When Cecilia came to bring us back I saw her like the Virgin Mary,” says Valya Tchervenyachka, now in her sixties.


Last November, a French magazine published documents appearing to exonerate the medical workers and suggesting that the children were in fact injected with tainted blood by Libyan intelligence and special forces commanders.


The testimony was found in a diary belonging to Shukri Ghanem, who served as Kadhafi’s prime minister from 2003 until 2006. — AFP


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