In 1998, at a time when her country was mired in hyperinflation, Valya Chervenyashka left her rural Bulgarian village and went to work as a nurse in Benghazi, Libya, for US$250 a month, to pay for her daughters' college education.
Today, Chervenyashka and four other Bulgarian nurses, as well as a Palestinian doctor whose family moved to Libya in 1967, are under a death sentence in a Libyan jail and facing a firing squad, accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 hospitalized Libyan children with the AIDS virus, in order, according to the initial indictment, to undermine Libyan state security. They were also charged with working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
"Nurses from little towns in Bulgaria acting as agents of Mossad?" Antoanetta Ouzounova, one of Chervenyashka's daughters, said. "It all sounds funny and absurd until you realize your mother could die for it."
The motive of subversion has been dropped, but the death sentence stands. The nurses' final appeal is scheduled to be heard by the Libyan Supreme Court on Nov. 15. With that date approaching, President Georgi Parvanov of Bulgaria planned to raise the case at a meeting with US President George W. Bush in Washington yesterday.
International experts, including Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of the AIDS virus, have traveled to Libya to study the situation and have testified that the children were infected as a result of poor sanitary practices at the hospital, Al Fateh, in Benghazi.
The nurses testified that they were tortured in the months after their arrest in 1999. In a handwritten 2003 declaration to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, one, Snezhana Dimitrova, described part of the torture.
"They tied my hands behind my back," she wrote. "Then they hung me from a door. It feels like they are stretching you from all sides. My torso was twisted and my shoulders were dislocated from their joints from time to time. The pain cannot be described. The translator was shouting, `Confess or you will die here,"' she wrote.
For seven years the nurses' plight has simmered on the back burner of international politics, especially since Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan president, renounced terrorism and nuclear weapons in 2003. Last year, the European Commission invited Qaddafi to Brussels, Belgium, for lunch, and the US lifted trade sanctions.
But with time running out, negotiations to secure the nurses' release are "not moving well," Ivailo Kalfin, Bulgaria's foreign minister, said.
Solomon Passy, head of the Bulgarian National Assembly's Committee on Foreign Policy, said Bulgaria needed more international support, calling the medics "hostages."
"The Libyans need to know they won't get carrots like they won't get taken off the terrorist list until they release the nurses," he said.
If the nurses were Italian or British or American, some diplomats say, the case would have provoked a major international protest. Libyan officials have suggested that the Bulgarians pay US$10 million in compensation for each of the 420 children they accuse the nurses of infecting, according to Bulgarian and EU diplomats, saying that the families might then express forgiveness toward the nurses and ask for dismissal of the court case, a procedure permitted under Islamic law.
The Bulgarian government has rejected the idea, Kalfin said, noting that it was absurd to compare the nurses to terrorists, and that it would not pay "blood money since the nurses are not guilty."
Still, a senior EU diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been extensive "underground meetings" about a payment. Hoping to broker some kind of deal, the EU has sent diplomats and medical teams to Libya to study and consult on AIDS. It has flown dozens of children from Libya to Europe for treatment and held training sessions for doctors in Libya. Bulgaria agreed to send Libya 20 of the 50 pieces of medical equipment it had requested, and even offered to restructure the US$27 million in Libyan debt it holds.
Around the time the doctor and nurses were arrested, a team of WHO doctors were dispatched to study Libya's rapidly growing AIDS problem. Their internal report said the factor "mainly responsible for the current epidemic" was the accidental spread of the virus during medical procedures. It added that sterile supplies and better equipment were needed. Three years later, Montagnier was hired by Qaddafi's son to reconstruct what had happened at Al Fateh Hospital.
"Some of the children were infected before the Bulgarian nurses even arrived, and others after they left," Montagnier recalled in a recent telephone interview. He said that most of the children were also infected with various subtypes of hepatitis C, which can be transmitted to children only by injection, clear evidence that "there were many errors in hygiene in this hospital at the time."
A group of medical experts refuted the Montagnier report. Montagnier said the testimony "contained many mistakes showing that they didn't understand much about HIV."
"The hospital," he said, "needed a scapegoat."
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