SOFIA - Bulgaria might write off Libya's communist-era debt as a contribution to an international fund for the victims of an AIDS epidemic blamed on six of its medics, Bulgaria's prime minister said Wednesday.
"Freedom is priceless... And we will find a way of contributing money to the international Benghazi Fund. Writing off Libya's debt is one of the possible ways to do that but it is still under consideration," Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev told journalists.
"This is not ransom or an admission of guilt but is purely humanitarian aid," he said, a day after six Bulgarian medical workers returned home following an eight-year-long ordeal in a Libyan jail.
Libya's debt to Bulgaria, accumulated during the communist era when the two countries traded intensively, is estimated at 54 million dollars (39.3 million euros), he added.
But Foreign Minister Ivaylo Kalfin specified that this sum also included Bulgaria's calculated interest, whereas Libya did not believe in owing more money than it initially did.
Bulgaria, the European Union and Libya set up the so-called Benghazi Fund in 2006 to collect money for the treatment of over 400 children, victims of an AIDS epidemic at a hospital in Benghazi.
It was also meant as a way to obtain the release of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian-born doctor blamed for causing the outbreak but who have always protested their innocence.
The six returned to Bulgaria Tuesday following a compensation deal with the families of the infected children and a larger agreement by the EU to "further normalise relations" with the former pariah state, the financial aspects of which remained unclear.
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