After the release of the six Bulgarian medics accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV, the media, searching for an answer, focused on France’s first lady Cecilia Sarkozy, who was present at the negotiations.

“After holding the nurses for eight years, Muammar Gaddafi was supposedly unable to resist Sarkozy’s come-hither eyes and allowed her to walk away with his prisoners,” The Washington Post said.

The essential in the case was not “Sarkozy’s agile grandstanding” or “the protracted negotiations involving Bulgaria, the European Commission and Gaddafi’s gifted son, Saif al-Islam”.

The medics’ release pointed at “deep changes” in Libya, the newspaper said, changes that began in 2003 when Libya gave up its nuclear programme.

Muammar Gaddafi was the “real architect of the release”, according to The Washington Post. He took “grave risks” offending the Benghazi clans that engineered the nurses’ arrest.

“He has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.”