Bulgaria rejected a Libyan proposal for a deal to save...

Bulgaria rejected a Libyan proposal for a deal to save five Bulgarian nurses convicted of deliberately infecting children with AIDS from a firing squad and insisted that they were innocent.
"The defence categorically denies their guilt and there is evidence to prove the innocence of our compatriots," Bulgarian deputy foreign minister Gergana Grancharova said.
She was commenting on a proposal by Libyan Foreign Minister Abdelrahman Shalgham that the Bulgarian government negotiate with the families of more than 400 children who were allegedly injected with the HIV virus in a hospital in the northern Libyan city of Benghazi.
"If the families agree to negotiate, then we can get closer to a settlement," Shalgham told a news conference in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
He also suggested that the European Union could help "by taking charge of the treatment of the sick children either in Europe or by building them a special hospital in Benghazi." The nurses and a Palestinian doctor had been sentenced to death on May 6 by a Benghazi court after a four-year trial which ended with their conviction on charges of knowingly injecting children with tainted blood products. "There is a humanitarian dimension to this tragedy," Grancharova said, adding that Bulgaria wanted to help the victims. "But at this stage that does not entail negotiating with the families," she said.