Testimony That Bulgarian Nurses Were Tortured
    Le Nouvel Observateur

    Wednesday 17 May 2006

A former Libyan detainee asserts he witnessed the torture of five Bulgarian nurses accused of inoculating children with AIDS.

    "The nurses were beaten for a long time with thick cables. Then they were forced to run and to crawl and to stand on one leg with their arms raised," declared a Bulgarian former inmate of Libyan prisons on Wednesday, May 17, in an interview with Bulgaria's biggest newspaper, Troud.

    Smilian Tatchev spent 174 days in detention with the five nurses and a Palestinian doctor, tried on appeal since last Thursday and accused of having inoculated Libyan children with AIDS while they worked in a psychiatric hospital.

    Condemned to Death by the Inferior Court

    This witness denounces the confessions the nurses made: one nurse was given electroshocks and fed through a tube while bound to a chair. He tells about the strident screams of another nurse, also unable to feed herself, every time the door to her cell closed.

    The nurses and the Palestinian doctor were accused in 1999 of inoculating 426 Libyan children - of whom 51 are already dead - with the AIDS virus.

    They were condemned to death by a first court, even though they declared during the trial that their confessions had been extorted by force. In December 2005, the Libyan Supreme Court annulled this verdict, ordering a second trial.

    The condemned have already appealed to experts like French co-discoverer of the AIDS virus Luc Montagnier, who free them from any blame for the epidemic's appearance. According to them, the (Northern) Benghazi hospital was at fault for poor hygiene conditions.

    Trial Postponed

    The appeals trial, which opened Thursday in Tripoli, has been postponed until the opening of the hearing.

    A spokesman for the Bulgarian Foreign Affairs Minister, Dimitar Tsantchev, indicated that he expects the Appeals Court "to take into account the violations of procedure committed up until now and the categorical proof of the Bulgarians' innocence presented by the defense."

    Meanwhile, yesterday, the United States announced the complete re-establishment of its diplomatic links with Tripoli, putting an end to 25 years of commercial and diplomatic embargo.

    American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that her country intends to "withdraw Libya from the list of states supporting terrorism" and from the "annual list of states that do not fully cooperate with the United States' anti-terrorist efforts."