You Are Not Alone

Bulgarians join “jailed nurses”

Millions of Bulgarians have joined a nationwide campaign calling for the release of five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in a high-profile Aids trial in Libya, pollsters said today. A court in Tripoli convicted in December the nurses and a Palestinian doctor of intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV and sentenced them to death, despite scientific evidence the youngsters had the virus before the medical workers arrived in Libya.

The verdicts triggered outrage in Bulgaria, and “the salvation of the Bulgarian nurses became a cause that united the whole nation,” wrote Capital weekly. Some 39% of Bulgarians – or more than 3 million people – have actively joined the solidarity campaign, according to a survey by the AFIS polling agency published today. “In Sofia and the larger cities, the share of actively involved people reaches 58%,” said Chavdar Naydenov of the AFIS agency.