It was only the photograph of her granddaughter that kept Snezhana Dimitrova
going.
The picture of the little girl were her comfort through eight terrifying years
in a Libyan jail, three of them under sentence of death by firing squad.
The 54-year-old nurse had gone to the North African country to pursue her
vocation as a childcare specialist.
But after forced confessions arising from alleged torture, including beatings
and electric shocks, she was convicted, along with five colleagues, of
deliberately infecting 438 Libyan children with the Aids virus.
Yesterday morning on the tarmac at Sofia airport, Mrs Dimitrova tearfully
hugged her two children and the seven-year-old granddaughter she thought she
would never live to see.
“I waited so long for this moment,” she said as the Bulgarian capital came to
a standstill to savour the news.
Within an hour she and her colleagues — four other Bulgarian nurses and an
Egyptian-born trainee doctor — had received a presidential pardon.
“I still cannot believe that I am standing on Bulgarian soil,” said Kristiana
Valcheva, the nurse accused of being the ringleader of a Mossad plot to
undermine Libya.
“We were told the news at 4am and we left the jail at 5.45am to board the
plane,” she said. “Now I will try to get my previous life back.”
It will not be easy. All six claim to have been tortured. Mrs Valcheva
suffered electric shocks at least ten times, she says, during attempts to
wring a signed confession from her. All have missed children growing up and
parents growing old.
Nasya Nenova, at 41 the youngest nurse, and said to be the most sensitive of
the group, tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists with a broken
bottle to avoid interrogations.
Bulgarians have asked repeatedly why their citizens were singled out for
prosecution. There were other foreign nationals working at Benghazi’s
al-Fateh paediatric hospital, which employed nurses from as far afield as
France and the Philippines. But when the infection of hundreds of children
with HIV was discovered in the 1990s, Bulgarians believe that their country
was vulnerable to Libya’s search for a scapegoat to cover up poor hygiene
and the re-use of needles.
Georgi Milkov, a journalist who has followed the case, said: “Bulgaria at this
time had become a big friend of the US. The Libyans wanted to find somebody
from abroad to blame because it much easier to explain in such a society
that the problem was coming from Mossad or the CIA.”
In all, 19 foreign medics were arrested in 1999 but only five Bulgarian
nurses, a Bulgarian doctor married to one of them and the trainee doctor
were put on trial along with eight Libyans. During 2000, as the trial
dragged on, the first allegations of torture were made by the nurses’
families.
In court, evidence was presented by Luc Montagnier, the French doctor who
first isolated the HIV virus in the Benghazi hospital, that the infections
had taken place before most of the Bulgarians had arrived. But it cut no ice
with the Libyan judges and the five nurses and trainee doctor were found
guilty in May 2004.
On the day his wife was sentenced to death, Zdravko Georgiev, the husband of
Mrs Valcheva, was convicted of currency smuggling but freed because he had
already spent four years in prison, much of it in a cell measuring 9¾ft (3m)
by 5½ft with up to eight people at a time.
“I could not lie down to sleep for two years — I could only sit. You cannot
imagine it. In the summer it got so hot, people were passing out,” he said
yesterday after travelling back to Sofia with the freed nurses.
He said that he had four teeth knocked out by interrogators but added that it
was nothing compared with the electric shocks given to the nurses. “They
tortured and treated them like animals — in fact, you would not treat
animals like that,” he said. Charges of torture were brought against nine
policemen and a Libyan doctor in 2005. They were acquitted.
Even though Dr Georgiev was released, he was banned from leaving the country.
He has spent the past three years living in the Bulgarian embassy in
Tripoli, visiting his wife on Thursdays.
By late 2004 Colonel Gaddafi began to see the medics as an opportunity. The
prisoners became a bargaining chip in Libya’s emergence from years of
international isolation.
The nurses’ detention in 1999 came months after Libya, under huge
international pressure, had handed over Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the man
convicted over the Lockerbie bombing. They were convicted more than a year
after his first appeal was rejected.
Libya developed three main demands for the medics’ release: financial
compensation, international recognition and another review of the al-Megrahi
case.
By last weekend, all three had come together. A compensation package was
arranged of $1 million (£485 million) for the families of every HIV-infected
child, a review of Libya’s relations with the EU and a review of the
Lockerbie conviction, although the British Government denied any link.
As the nurses stepped off the French presidential aircraft they returned to a
country that market reforms and privatisations has changed beyond
recognition. But the biggest changes are in the shattered families. Snezhana
Dimitrova’s father, Ivan Klisurski, suffered a stroke after the confirmation
of the death sentence on his daughter in 2006 and was not sure he would live
to see her again.
Georgi Parvanov, the Bulgarian President, pledged that Bulgaria would continue
to support the Aids-stricken children despite the ordeal. In a moving
address to the medics, he said: “I know that you lived through monstrous
moments. More than eight years of your lives passed in suffering. But you
survived. You are the real winners in this battle for freedom.”
From sedition to statecraft
— Colonel Gaddafi came to power in a 1969 coup, swept away the
monarchy, nationalised industry and expelled foreign troops. A later
“people’s revolution” solidified his control, accelerating Libya’s economic
decline
— He dreamt of a unified Arab state as a counterweight to
perceived Western enemies. Attempts to merge Libya with Egypt, Syria and
Tunisia in different combinations all failed
— Libyan security forces were linked to the 1988 Lockerbie
disaster and an attack on a French airliner in 1989. US air strikes and UN
sanctions followed Britain broke off relations after a policewoman was shot
dead in London during anti-Gaddafi protests
— In 2003 Libya admitted the Lockerbie bombing. UN sanctions were
lifted and UK diplomatic relations restored
— Tony Blair welcomed Gaddafi back to the international fold in
2003, with first visit by a British leader since 1943. Relations with US
normalised last year
Sources: Global Security; UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Set free
Valia Cherveniashka 52, mother of two daughters, from Biala Slatina, a
small town in northwest Bulgaria. Worked in a hospital in the Libyan city of
Tarbouha between 1984 and 1997, before moving to the al-Fateh hospital in
Benghazi. Her husband, Emil Uzunov, was the first to bring the arrest of the
medics to public attention in Bulgaria.
Snezhana Dimitrova 54, worked as a nurse in Sofia and arrested six
months after her arrival at the al-Fateh hospital in 1998. A diabetic who
suffered a nervous breakdown in 2005 and broke her leg last year. She has a
daughter, a son and a seven-year-old granddaughter whom she knew only
through photographs.
Nasya Nenova 41, worked at a hospital in the eastern Bulgarian city of
Sliven before moving to Libya in 1998. After complaining of torture, she
withdrew her confession and tried to commit suicide. Married with a son, who
was a schoolboy when she left Bulgaria and is now at university in France.
Valentina Siropoulo 48, worked in the intensive care unit of Pazardjik
hospital, Bulgaria, before arriving in Libya in February 1998 to earn more
money to send her son to university. She last saw him in 2003 and he now has
a master’s degree from Sofia Technical University. Her face has been left
partially paralysed, allegedly by torture.
Kristiana Valcheva 48, went to Libya with her husband, Dr Zdravko
Georgiev, 58, in 1991. Accused of being the Mossad-inspired organiser of the
HIV plot. Husband released on the day she received the death penalty in
2004. He stayed in the Bulgarian Embassy in Tripoli and visited her every
Thursday.
Ashraf Alhajouj 38, born in Egypt. Was a trainee doctor at the al-Fateh
hospital. It took his family ten months to find the jail where he was being
held. His sister and Palestinian father fled Libya in 2005 and were granted
refugee status in the Netherlands. He became a Bulgarian citizen last month.
