Home at last, after eight years of hell in a foreign prison

by David Charter

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 93/4ft (3m) by 51/2ft 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 (Å“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."

Times, UK