SOFIA, Nov 11 (AFP) - Bulgaria will not pay compensation to secure the release of five of its nurses on death row in Libya for allegedly infecting hundreds of children with the HIV virus, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivaylo Kalfin said Friday.
"This is not acceptable for us. You pay if you are guilty and that is not the case with the nurses," the minister told AFP, ahead of ruling expected next week by Libya's Supreme Court on appeal motions by the nurses.
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad in May 2004 for having knowingly injected with HIV-tainted blood 426 children in a hospital in the northern Libyan town of Benghazi.
The six appealed the death sentence on the basis of testimony by medical experts who said the hospital AIDS epidemic was sparked by poor hygiene long before the arrival of the foreign workers.
Libya's Supreme Court was expected to rule Tuesday on their appeal. It can either confirm the death sentence, send the case back to the lower court for reconsideration, or postpone its ruling.
Bulgarian press on Friday cited Western diplomats in Tripoli as saying that the having the sentences upheld would in fact be the best solution as it would open the door for a political solution.
"Despite its initial horror effect ... (it) is indeed the best option for the Bulgarians since it will open possibilities for political negotiations between Tripoli on the one hand, and Sofia, Brussels and Washington, on the other," Dnevnik newspaper said.
Last December the Libyan government, in a move to allow the six convicts to be freed, sought compensation for the victims' families equal to that paid out by Libya to relatives of those killed in a bomb attack on a Pan Am plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.
Bulgaria refused, a position that still holds as the appeal ruling nears.
Compensation payments "are out of the question," Kalfin told AFP, although Bulgaria does feel sympathy for the infected children and their families.
He added that a Bulgarian NGO has already bought medical equipment to improve treatment of the children, part a million-euro EU action plan under way since September to improve Libya's capablity to combat AIDS.
The European Union, the Council of Europe, and the United States have lobbied intensively for the release of the doctor and nurses.
"This case is no longer a bilateral issue, it is a high profile issue that has drawn interest from the European Union and the United States," Kalfin said.
He also downplayed reports in the British press saying that the Bulgarians, who have already spent almost seven years in prison, could be traded for the Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, condemned in Britain for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people were dead.
"There can be no connection whatsoever between the two cases. I do not want to see the nurses used in this context," Kalfin said.
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