Reuters TV
By Anna Mudeva
SOFIA (Reuters) - Six foreign medics convicted of infecting Libyan children with HIV have been freed under a deal to improve Libya's ties with the European Union.
Their return to Bulgaria after eight years in captivity ended what Libya's critics called a human rights scandal and lifted a barrier to attempts by the long-isolated north African state to normalise ties with the outside world.
Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor who recently took Bulgarian citizenship after their arrival in Sofia on a French jet. The medics said they were innocent and had been tortured to confess.
"I don't know what to say, I've been living for this moment," 54-year-old nurse Snezhana Dimitrova said as the medics and their families cried and hugged each other at Sofia airport.
The Bulgarian nurses were transferred to Sofia after the EU, which Bulgaria joined in January, agreed a deal with Libya on medical aid and political ties, officials said.
"This decision will open the way for a new and enhanced relationship between the EU and Libya and reinforce our ties with the Mediterranean region and the whole of Africa," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said.
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 a two-page deal with Libya, laying out how ties could be boosted, a European source said.
"It covers everything -- trade, support for archaeology, illegal immigration, grants for students and visa questions," the European source said.
A Libyan close to the negotiations said the EU also agreed to help upgrade a hospital in Benghazi, Libya's second city and the town where the infections first appeared in the 1990s.
Bulgaria and its allies in Brussels and Washington had suggested that not freeing the nurses would hurt Libya's efforts to emerge from decades of diplomatic isolation imposed for what the West called its support of terrorism.
LAST MINUTE BREAKTHROUGH
Claude Gueant, chief of staff of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said he had been unsure about whether the nurses would actually be released until the last minute.
"Right up to the arrival of the nurses at the airport at Tripoli this morning, around 6 am, we had doubts. Right up until the end we had doubts," said Gueant.
Sarkozy had pledged to make the medics' release a foreign policy priority and said he would visit Libya on Wednesday to help Tripoli's reintegration with the West.
Following the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of 460 HIV victims, Libya last week commuted the death sentences against the six to life imprisonment.
That paved the way for the medics to return home under a 1984 prisoner exchange agreement.
"I still cannot grasp what's happening," said 48-year-old nurse Christiana Valcheva.
The medics 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.
Tuesday's transfer of the medics became possible after European Union and French officials achieved a breakthrough in talks with Libya overnight, Bulgarian officials said.
"We succeeded because we managed to transform this problem from a problem between Bulgaria and Libya to a problem between Libya and the European Union. This was key," Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said.
The French presidency and the commission also thanked Qatar for its mediation.
Libya emerged from decades of isolation in 2003 when it scrapped a programme of prohibited weapons and returned to international mainstream politics.
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.
(Additional reporting by Kremena Miteva and Tsvetelia Ilieva in Sofia, William Maclean in Algiers, Jon Boyle in Paris, Paul Taylor and Ingrid in Brussels)