Bulgarian officials and politicians continued soliciting...

Bulgarian officials and politicians continued soliciting international support for five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death by a Libyan court on charges of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the AIDS virus. On the sidelines of the Arab League Summit in Tunis Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy met with his Tunisian counterpart Habib Ben Yahia and briefed him on the trial of the Bulgarian medical professionals in Libya. In Moscow, Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Sergei Stanishev received assurances from Russian State Duma Speaker and Unified Russia Party leader Boris Gryzlov that Russia would take up the cause of the five Bulgarian with Russia's Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and the Minister of Civil Defence, Emergencies and Natural Disasters Sergey Shoygu, who was also co-chairman of the Joint Intergovernmental Commission between Russia and Libya. "The principal avenue open to Bulgaria at this point on the issue of the condemned nurses in Libya is to raise this issue at bilateral talks with all our international partners," Stanishev said.