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'We were treated like animals'
26/07/2007 22:14 - (SA)
Sofia - The Palestinian-born doctor freed this week after an eight-year ordeal in a Libyan prison spoke for the first time on Thursday of the torture he and five Bulgarian nurses underwent in jail.
"All of us were treated like animals. We were tortured for a long time, with electricity, beatings, deprivation of sleep" and drugs, Ashraf Juma Hajuj, who now has Bulgarian nationality, told journalists.
He and the Bulgarian nurses were arrested in Libya in 1999 and made to confess to deliberately infecting 438 children with the HIV virus at a hospital in the Libyan town of Benghazi where they worked.
Hajuj said his torturers focussed their attentions especially on him and two of the nurses, Kristiana Valcheva and Nasya Nenova.
"We were tortured in an awful way, the others too, but they seem to have had a plan to make us three confess."
During their first year in prison, the six medics were kept isolated in separate cells, Hajuj said.
"We were kept in a station for training police dogs. Every one of us was alone in a cell. We were treated really badly. We can never ever forgive this. Only God can forgive, I cannot," he said.
He demonstrated how for a year he was forced to sleep while kneeling, his hands handcuffed behind his back.
"If I bent my head down, a policemen kicked me. I still have scars over my body, they remain and I am asking any professional to come and examine my scars as evidence that we were tortured," he said.
"They are still there after eight-and-a-half years and no one can remove such memories from our souls, hearts, minds. We were tortured not because we were guilty, but because we were innocent."
The six medics were sentenced to death in 2004 on the basis of confessions by the doctor and two of the nurses who later retracted their statements, saying they had been extracted under torture.
Hajuj said that immediately after his arrest in 1999, he was forced to leave his fingerprints on blank sheets of paper on which admissions of guilt were later printed to be used as signed confessions.
The doctor, who was recently given Bulgarian nationality so that he could be extradited along with the five nurses, said he tried to keep his head high during his time in Libya.
"Because we are innocent. One day the truth will come out as much as they try to hide it. Corruption is all over the country. The health system, the security, the justice, everywhere," he said.
"From the first moment we were scapegoats for something and I still don't know for what."
Maintaining their innocence, he pointed to a report by French co-discoverer of Aids Luc Montagnier, which said the infections at the hospital were due to a lack of hygiene and began before the medics arrived.
"It was really dirty, there was a shortage of medical supplies, no organisation whatsoever... it was not a hospital, (it was) a house for animals."
- AFP
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