PARIS, Jan 22, 2008 (AFP) - A French parliamentary inquiry has established that Paris did not offer Libya military aid in exchange for the release of six foreign medics jailed on charges of infecting children with AIDS, its rapporteur said Tuesday.
The commission of inquiry, tasked with shedding light on the high-profile operation to free the medics on July 24, adopted its conclusions on Tuesday and is to publish them in full early next month.
But Axel Poniatowski, a ruling party deputy and the commission's rapporteur, said it had found there was no trade-off between their release and military contracts signed between Paris and Tripoli in the following days.
The five Bulgarian nurses, who along with a Palestinian doctor spent eight years in jail on charges of infecting Libyan children with AIDS, were given a warm welcome at the French National Assembly on Tuesday.
The Socialist members of the commission refused to ratify the final report in protest at President Nicolas Sarkozy's refusal to allow his ex-wife Cecilia, who travelled to Tripoli to negotiate the release, to testify.
But their boycott did not prevent the report's adoption, since the ruling right-wing UMP party holds a majority of seats in the commission.
Since October the inquiry has heard testimony from the medics themselves, and from key Sarkozy aide Claude Gueant.
But it failed to secure hearings however with Cecilia Sarkozy, the son of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, Qatar's ambassador to France, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier or former British prime minister Tony Blair.
"The scandal is the non-appearance of Cecilia Sarkozy" who was "the key player" in the operation to secure their release, the commission's Socialist president Pierre Moscovici told RTL radio.
Poniatowski said the presidency and ruling UMP party "didn't want to fall into sensationalism" by forcing her to testify.
He said three factors led Libya to authorise the release: the promise of new relations with the European Union, compensation payments to the families of sick children -- totalling one million dollars each -- and Tripoli's will to resume bilateral relations with Paris.
"France managed to find the political arguments to convince Libya that it was in its interest to release the nurses," he said.
Sarkozy travelled to Tripoli the day after the medics' release, overseeing the signature of arms contracts and a nuclear cooperation accord and inviting Kadhafi to Paris for a 10-day state visit in December.
The trip underscored the former pariah's return to international respectability, but sparked a barrage of protests over his human rights record and Sarkozy's decision to invite him.
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