Libya criticised the pardon Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov granted the six Bulgarian medics accused of deliberate HIV infection in Libya.
The six were pardoned less than an hour after they arrived in Bulgaria under a Bulgarian-Libyan judicial agreement.
According to Libyan authorities, the pardon was a ‘betrayal’ and ‘illegal procedure’, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Libyan foreign minister Abdul-Rahman Mohammad Shalgam said that the medics had to be transferred to a place where they had to serve their life imprisonment sentences, instead of being liberated so loudly and illegally.
Prime minister of Libya Baghdadi Mahmudi said that Bulgaria violated the legal procedures for extradition of the international legislation and the judicial contract between Bulgaria and Libya. We kept the legal procedure, but Bulgaria betrayed us, he said.
According to Mahmudi, French president Nikolas Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia Sarkozy also expressed dissatisfaction with the way the six were pardoned.
