One year after regaining their freedom, five Bulgarian nurses and a doctor who spent eight years of their lives in a Libyan jail, much of it on death row, are still haunted by their torture and feel abandoned.
”I want to look to the future. But the nightmare where I am kidnapped, strangled or bitten by black dogs haunts me and I cry in my sleep,” says Valya Chervenyashka, who has returned to her job as a hospital nurse in the small north-western town of Byala Slatina.
Chervenyashka and five other Bulgarian medical workers were twice sentenced to death in Libya on charges of having ”knowingly” infected 438 Libyan children with Aids-tainted blood at a hospital in the north-eastern city of Benghazi.
Fifty-six of the children died but the medics maintained their innocence, supported by testimony from international health experts.
The medics, who became known as the ”Benghazi Six”, said they were tortured with electricity and bitten by police dogs in order to confess.
”When I asked for water during the torture, the prison guard forced her flip-flop in my mouth,” Chervenyashka remembers. ”Executions in the prison were carried out close to our cell. We died every time the cell door opened.”
Last July, Libya’s top legal body, the Supreme Judicial Council, commuted the medics’ death sentences to life imprisonment and the six were allowed to return and serve their time in Bulgaria.
Escorted home on July 24 by the former wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Cecilia, and European External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, they were promptly pardoned by Bulgaria’s President, Georgy Parvanov.
But one year after her release, Chervenyashka says she feels abandoned and cannot come to terms with the misery she is facing in her country.
Her monthly salary amounts to €136. Meanwhile, the conditions in her hospital ”have changed little over 10 years”, she says, gesturing towards ragged mattresses on the children’s beds.
Another nurse, Valentina Siropulo, with whom Chervenyashka has kept in touch, has started working in the paediatric ward of a hospital in her southern hometown of Pazardzhik. She is also haunted by her time in jail and still asks: ”Why me?”
”I turned up in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she adds, with a resigned sigh.
Two other nurses, Nasya Nenova and Kristiana Valcheva, have just finished their first-year physiotherapy studies in Sofia. ”This will be better paid, we can open a private practice,” says Nasya, who got divorced shortly after her return home.
Snezhana Dimitrova, who like Valcheva has published a book about her ordeal, cannot go back to work as one of her arms still feels numb from the tortures. ”I enjoy being with my family. I breathe freedom,” she says.
But Ashraf al-Hajuj, the Palestinian-born doctor who was imprisoned with the nurses and later freed with them after being granted Bulgarian citizenship, remains uncompromising.
Hajuj, who married a Bulgarian woman and has a three-month-old son, has filed claims against Libya with the European Court of Human Rights in Geneva and a French court.
”I will not miss any chance, anywhere in the whole world, to raise a case against that dictator,” he says about Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.
”They [the Libyans] know I am innocent. I’ll push them to admit that … The Libyan dictator must pay,” Hajuj adds.
The young doctor never received a diploma as he was arrested in 1999 while doing his compulsory hospital internship ahead of graduation.
He now supports his family with occasional small jobs and insists: ”It is a must for the EU to provide support. We are European citizens.”
The nurses said they would be happy to get any compensation but they are still waiting for the government to fulfil its promise to grant them minimum pensions. The flats they were given by a company upon arrival still lack running water and electricity.
But President Parvanov turned a somewhat cold eye on the medics’ pleas on Monday.
”Hundreds of thousands, not to say millions of people, in Bulgaria face no less bigger problems … There should be an engagement but no one should be privileged,” he told 24 Hours daily newspaper. — Sapa-AFP