Libyan Father: We Lied about HIV Outbreak, Bulgarians Innocent

A file photo dated April 2004 shows Mohammed Gadir introducing his HIV-infected son to Bulgarian journalists. Photo by Momchil Indzhov/24 Hours

The father of a Libyan boy, who got infected with HIV in a Benghazi children's hospital in the late 1990s, has confessed that not the Bulgarian medics, but leader Muammar Gaddafi was behind the outbreak.

"My son has HIV. Gaddafi is to blame. We could not say it then. We can say it now. But the revolution means the drugs he takes every day are not coming from Tripoli," Mohammed Gadir, 56, told the Guardian.

Seven years ago, as the government was making scapegoats of a group of Bulgarian nurses, Gadir took the public position that he was "100% certain" that his son had been infected by foreigners testing a "manufactured" strain of HIV on unsuspecting Libyans. He says now that was not his view then but asks what he was supposed to say when living under Gaddafi's regime.

"Gaddafi gave them AIDS. The sheikhs told us that," he said.

The revolution has finally permitted Mohammed Gadir to say who he really thinks is responsible for the "curse" placed on his13-year-old son as an infant, but now he is desperately worried over the shortage of the antiretroviral drugs that keep Wanis a fit teenager.

"It is not only Wanis. There are 450 children like this and only a week of drugs left. Most of them are in Benghazi. People have forgotten about them,"said  the father, a former diplomat for Gaddafi, who worked once at the Libyan embassy in London, but now has taken the side of the rebels.

The confession comes just a month after Libya's former Justice Minister, who recently joined the anti-Gaddafi forces in the country, stated that not the Bulgarian medics, but the regime of leader Muammar Gaddafi was responsible for infecting more than 400 children with HIV.

Mustafa Abudel-Jalil made the statement for Al Jazeera, saying the trial involving Bulgarian medics was just one of several serious crimes committed by Gaddafi's regime against his own people.

Eleven years after their arrest and the horrors of Libya's jails, the six Bulgarian medics, who were sentenced to death in the Jamahiriya, have been morally vindicated, but they say the much-awaited moral victory over the mercurial, merciless and manipulating tyrant is not that good bit of news. After having spent years on end in an African prison, much of it on a death row, they say the absolving just came a bit too late.

The travesty trial of the Bulgarian medics in Libya was a clear act of blackmail from the very beginning. In 2007, Bulgaria completely wrote off Libya's debt to facilitate negotiations and obtain the release from jail of the six Bulgarian medics.

The involvement of the Sarkozy couple in the final stages of the talks and the suspicious deal the French President struck with Gaddafi secured their transfer and subsequent pardoning in Sofia.

Tripoli protested against the pardoning of the Bulgarian medics, claiming it breaches the prisoner transfer agreement signed in 1984, based on which the medics were repatriated.

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