'My innocence kept me alive'
2007-07-24 19:50
Sofia - One of the Bulgarian nurses freed by Tripoli described on Tuesday what kept her going for eight years while she faced the prospect of execution or spending the rest of her days in a Libyan prison.
"The only thing that kept me alive during all these years, (through) the painful, terrible tortures, the uncertainty, the death sentences, was the belief I cherished in my heart, in my soul, that we are innocent," Valentina Siropulo said.
Siropulo, 48, was speaking to Bulgarian national radio shortly after setting foot again in Sofia, and related how she and her five colleagues received news of their imminent transfer to Bulgaria on Tuesday morning.
'They were waiting for us'
"We were all in our beds, sleeping, when they came and told us we should be ready to leave in an hour or so. We got up, completely messed up, confused, not really knowing what was happening and if all this was true or another lie.
"Then a diplomat from the Bulgarian embassy came to the jail and we calmed down a bit. At 06:25 we were on board the French plane," she said.
Also aboard were France's first lady Cecilia Sarkozy and EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who had pushed for the medics' swift release.
"They were waiting for us, they were really nice, people who understood that our condition was unstable. They behaved really kindly. Time flew on the plane and here we are in Bulgaria now."
Siropulo arrived in Libya a year before she was arrested in February 1999.
She later said she was reluctant from the beginning to go there and leave her son Lyubomir a year before he finished high school but she wanted to earn money to send him to university.
Before their tearful reunion at Sofia airport, mother and son had only met again briefly in 2003 when he visited her in jail.
'Medieval tortures'
"Little by little we have to integrate and get our normal lives back. It will be difficult," Siropulo said.
The five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-born doctor, who was recently given Bulgarian nationality and was also released on Tuesday, were arrested in Libya in 1999 for a tainted-blood scandal and spent most of the following years on death row.
The medics said they were tortured in jail to confess infecting 438 Libyan children with HIV-tainted blood at the Benghazi hospital where they worked.
They said they were subjected to beatings, electric shocks and "medieval tortures" and that police officers set dogs on them to make them talk.
Another nurse, Nasya Nenova, attempted suicide, later saying she could not stand the torture any longer.
The allegations shocked Bulgaria and finally brought the case to the attention of international human rights watchdogs as well as the European Union and the United States.