Joined: 05 Oct 2005
Posts: 315
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Prague (dpa) - Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico indirectly acknowledged a Libyan court verdict that sentenced five Bulgarian nurses to death for intentionally infecting some 400 children with the HIV virus, it was reported on Friday.
"The victims should be discussed as intensively as the perpetrators are," the SME newspaper quoted Fico as saying. His comments were made at a press conference in Tripoli where the Slovak leader met Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi. Fico, who offered Libya a two-week treatment stay in Slovakia for some of the infected children, failed to infirm the verdict, the daily reported. "We are glad that Slovakia recognizes Libyan justice," Mahmudi was meanwhile quoted as said. According to the report, Fica's statement prompted a shocked Bulgarian reaction. "I do not believe that the Slovak premier Robert Fico identified the Palestinian doctor and the Bulgarian nurses as perpetrators," SITA new agency quoted Bulgarian Ambassador to Slovakia, Ognian Garkov as saying. While the prime minister, who is a lawyer by training, explained that in criminal law the term perpetrator is used to describe suspects, a law expert from Bratislava's Comenius University told the newspaper that the word could only be used to describe convicts. Fico's foreign policy choices have caused a stir at home since his center-left government took office last July. Aside from a trip to Libya that focused mainly on economic interests, he also recently attended an official reception at the Cuban embassy in Slovakia. The death sentences against the medics for deliberately infecting children in a hospital in the Libyan port city of Benghazi were confirmed by a Libyan court late last year. The European Union, which Bulgaria joined on January 1 and Slovakia nearly three years ago, is campaigning for the release of the medics who have been held in Libya for the past eight years. |
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