the Bulgarian government rejected a proposal by Tripoli

the Bulgarian government rejected a proposal by Tripoli that it pay compensation to secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in Libya. "There is no question of paying indemnities to buy the freedom of our nurses because this would amount to acknowledging their guilt, which is not possible. We are convinced that they are innocent," Deputy Foreign Minister Guergana Grantcharova told national radio. A lawyer for one of the nurses and the mother of another said that they agreed with the government's position.
The five nurses and a Palestinian doctor had been condemned to death in May by a Libyan tribunal which found that they had infected hundreds of children in a hospital in Benghazi in northern Libya with the HIV virus. Libyan Foreign Minister Abdelraham Shalgham had said on December 5 in Libya that the verdict could be overturned if Bulgaria paid compensation to the families of the infected children, of whom 46 had died so far.