SOFIA, BULGARIA — For almost 8 1/2 years, they languished in a Libyan prison, condemned to death by military firing squad, convicted of a crime that was the antithesis of their careers in medicine.
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor had deliberately infected more than 400 Libyan children with the virus that causes AIDS, a Libyan court had ruled. Why? First, it was supposedly part of a twisted plot to destabilize the government. Later, the Libyans claimed, the crime was a medical experiment gone horribly wrong.
The six health workers, their faces peering, year after year, through metal bars as an appalled but apparently impotent West looked on, proclaimed their innocence, and independent reports by experts backed them up. Their confessions were extracted through torture, they said; their supporters viewed them as pawns in an authoritarian regime's quest to end its financially crippling isolation.
And then, on Tuesday, their ordeal came to a dramatic end.
It was a denouement brought about after months of negotiations leading to the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars for the infected children in Libya, which critics likened to ransom; the promise of new privileges for Libya's government; and entreaties from the likes of the emir of Qatar and France's new first lady.
Whisked out of their prison before dawn, the six were bundled onto a French presidential jet and flown to the Bulgarian capital. Minutes later, Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the nurses, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valia Cherveniashka and Kristiana Valcheva, and the doctor, Ashraf Alhajouj, an Egyptian-born Palestinian who had been granted Bulgarian citizenship.
"I feel like I've been in a coma for eight years, and only now am I waking," Dimitrova said, according to her son Ivaylo, who was among the jubilant, tearful relatives and friends and crowds of well-wishers who greeted the health workers at Sofia's airport.
"I still can't believe that I am standing on Bulgarian soil," Valcheva told reporters. "I want my life to return to what it was before."
The nurses, ages 41 to 54, had learned they were being freed only hours earlier. They stepped steadily but stiffly down the airplane's staircase and began to shake hands with waiting officials and diplomats. But then relatives burst through and ran to the mothers and sisters they had not touched in years, nearly knocking them over in a blissful crush.
