Exactly one year has passed since the release of the six Bulgarian medics on July 24 2007, after they had spent more than eight years in a Libyan prison.

The medics were arrested in 1999 and accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV in a hospital in the Libyan town of Benghazi. Despite several reports of international experts, stating that the infection resulted from poor hygiene in the hospital, the medics were sentenced to death twice.

In July 2007, after the active interference of the international community, the sentence of the medics was commuted to life imprisonment. On July 24, under an agreement for prisoners’ extradition, they returned to Bulgaria on the board of the French presidential aircraft, accompanied by France's then-first lady Cecilia Sarkozy. Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov pardoned the medics at the very airport.

One year later, Bulgaria commemorated the day with a thanksgiving service in one of Sofia’s major churches, St Sofia.

Meanwhile, the medics had announced a protest in front of the Cabinet building. Nevertheless, only their spokesperson and co-ordinator of their May 6th Foundation, Rossen Markov, appeared, Focus news agency said. The medics were too ashamed to appear, he said.

Markov told journalists that the medics continued to insist on meeting Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev. They wanted to do so because he was the only one to refuse meeting them, Markov said. It was a matter of attitude, he said.

Markov arranged seven little chairs in front of the Council of Ministers, with the sign “We accuse, we are waiting”. The chairs were seven, because the actual number of the Bulgarian medics imprisoned in Libya was seven. One of them was released earlier.