HIV medics freed after Libya-EU deal

SOFIA, July 24 (Reuters) Six foreign medics convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV were freed today after a partnership deal between Tripoli and the European Union ended their eight-year ordeal.

Their return to Bulgaria ends what Libya's critics called a human rights scandal and lets the long-isolated north African state complete a process of normalising its ties with the West.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor who recently took Bulgarian citizenship after they arrived in Sofia on a French jet. The medics have always said they were innocent and had been tortured to confess.

''I know I am free, I know I am on Bulgarian soil, but I still cannot believe it,'' 48-year-old nurse Christiana Valcheva said as the medics and their families wept and hugged each other at the airport.

The Bulgarian nurses were flown to Sofia after the EU, which Bulgaria joined in January, agreed a last-minute breakthrough deal with Libya on medical aid and political ties.

''We hope to go on further normalising our relations with Libya.

Our relations with Libya were in a large extent blocked by the non-settlement of this medics issue,'' EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.

Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgam said the deal had opened the way to ''full cooperation and partnership between Libya and the European Union''.

Bulgaria and its allies in Brussels and Washington had suggested not freeing the nurses would hurt Libya's efforts to emerge from more than three decades of diplomatic isolation imposed for what the West called its support of terrorism.

It began the process in 2003 by scrapping a banned weapons programme and returned to mainstream international politics.

COOPERATION DEAL Shalgam said the deal involved EU support and assistance for the more than 400 infected children in European hospitals for the rest of their lives.

It also provides for the rehabilitation of two hospitals and a medical centre in Benghazi, the eastern Libyan city where the HIV outbreak occurred. The EU also offered assistance to Libya in education, archaeology and stemming illegal migration.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner travelled to Tripoli with Cecilia Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, to help free the medics and flew with them to Sofia. She signed the deal with Libya, a European source said.

Nineteen Bulgarian medical workers were initially detained in 1999 and six stood trial. One Bulgarian doctor was released in 2004 when the six medics were sentenced to death.

Foreign HIV experts testified the infections started before the six arrived at the hospital, and were more likely the result of poor hygiene.

The victims' families have said the nurses were part of a Western plot to undermine Muslims in Libya and the case sparked outrage in Benghazi where 56 of the children have died.

Human rights group Amnesty International welcomed the medics' release and urged Libya to proceed with much-needed justice reforms to ensure such a case never happened again.

TRIPOLI'S REINTEGRATION French President Nicolas Sarkozy had pledged to make the medics' release a foreign policy priority and said he would visit Libya tomorrow to help Tripoli's reintegration.

Neither France nor the EU had made any payment to Libya to ensure the nurses' release, Sarkozy said.

Last week Libya commuted the death sentences against the six to life imprisonment following the payment of a 460 million dollar financial settlement -- 1 million dollar to each HIV victim's family.

That paved the way for the nurses to return home under a 1984 prisoner exchange agreement.

The medics, who looked in good health, and their families will stay for the next few days in the presidential residency on the outskirts of Sofia where they will undergo medical checks.

''We had very, very tough moments, we were nearly on the verge of death,'' 48-year-old nurse Valentina Siropoulo told Bulgarian national radio. ''Gradually we will have to get back to normal life now. It will be hard''.

The Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Alhajouj will likely travel to the Netherlands on Friday to visit his family, his lawyer told Dutch agency ANP. He has lived most of his life in Libya.

The Bulgarian nurses left the relatively poor Balkan country of 7.8 million people in the late 1990s to work in Libya, where health care salaries were much higher.

The country has begun opening its big energy reserves to foreign oil firms and the United States said this month it was sending its first ambassador to Tripoli in 35 years.

REUTERS RJ BD2332