Nicolas Sarkozy faced a barrage of criticism yesterday for agreeing to build a nuclear reactor in Libya as concern grew over the price extracted by Colonel Gaddafi for the release of five Bulgarian nurses this week.

Opponents said that the French President had effectively exchanged the nurses and their colleague, a Palestinian doctor, for nuclear technology.

The outcome was also criticised in Libya, where officials said that the Bulgarian President’s pardoning of the nurses had violated the deal. Families of the children whom the medics were convicted of infecting with HIV demanded that Interpol should rearrest them. President Sarkozy responded that Arab states should be trusted with nuclear technology or the West risked a breakdown of relations so serious that there could be a “war of civilisations”. He denied a link between the deal to build a nuclear-powered desalination plant and the handing over of the group to his wife, Cécilia, on Tuesday.

They were freed after an agreement to pay $1 million (£500,000) to each of the families of 438 HIV-infected children. There was also an undertaking to revive Libya’s relations with the EU, including market access for Libyan goods, assistance with border management and scholarships for Libyan students in the EU.

The European Commission and Bulgarian Government were forced to deny yesterday that a ransom had been paid for the release of the six, who claimed that they had been tortured. Noël Mamère, a Green Party MP, said of President Sarkozy: “He is running grave risks for the planet. And he is running the risk of turning France into the supplier of military nuclear capacity to some absolutely unacceptable regimes.”

Greenpeace said that the deal posed “an enormous problem of nuclear proliferation and is consistent with the French policy of irresponsibly exporting its nuclear technology”.

Claude Guéant, President Sarkozy’s chief of staff, said that the nuclear co-operation deal meant that “a country that respects international rules can obtain civilian nuclear energy”. The President added: “Nuclear power is the energy of the future. If we do not give the energy of the future to the countries of the southern Mediterranean, how will they develop themselves? And if they do not develop, how will we fight terrorism and fanaticism?”

A spokeswoman for the European Commission said that it had already provided €2.5 million (£1.7 million) of training and support to the hospital in Benghazi at the centre of the case and for the stricken children. A further €10 million of assistance would be provided over the next five years. She said that no direct payments had been made to the Libyan Government.

Sergei Stanishev, the Bulgarian Prime Minister, said that his country may write off the $54 million debt owed to it by Libya. He added that this would be a humanitarian gesture, not “paying ransom or admitting guilt”.

Bulgaria’s pardon of the medical workers as soon as they arrived on Tuesday brought an angry denunciation from the Libyan organisation representing the children’s families. “We deeply condemn and are deeply disappointed at the absurdity and disrespect shown by the Bulgarian presidential pardon,” it said. It called on Interpol to have police arrest the group “so that they can spend the rest of their sentences in prison”.

Boris Velchev, the Bulgarian Prosecutor-General, defended the pardon, saying: “When a person is transferred in his own country to serve the sentence imposed in another, it is the laws of the home country that are applied to him from then on.” Ashraf Alhajouj, 38, the Palestinian doctor, said yesterday that he and the nurses had been forced into confessing to infecting the children with HIV deliberately. “We were treated like animals. We were tortured in an awful way, with electricity. We were beaten, deprived of sleep,” he said. “We cannot forget. Only God can forgive. I will never forgive.”

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