The contamination of 232 children at the Benghazi hospital in 1998 would be the voluntary act of the Gaddafi regime, reveal notes relayed by Médiapart.
It is a terrible secret revealed by the posthumous diaries of the Prime Minister of Gaddafi. These notes, now in the hands of French justice, Mediapart was able to consult them. They come back to the case of Bulgarian nurses, a case with worldwide repercussions, to which they bring new information.
The facts go back to 1998; in Benghazi hospital, 232 children are infected with HIV. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime accuses a team of Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor from the hospital of being the cause of voluntary contamination. All are sent to Libyan prisons, where they will stay for eight years while outside the negotiations between the European Union and Libya stall.
To divert attention
Until the French intervention. The images are broadcast everywhere: Cécilia Sarkozy bringing these released health professionals back on her plane, after an agreement concluded between the President of the French Republic and his Libyan counterpart.
The affair had moved the world and had ended there, with diplomatic success for France and many questions about what Nicolas Sarkozy had promised. As for the contamination of the children, most of whom died, it was blamed on poor sanitary conditions in the hospital and an accident during a blood transfusion.
The writings of Choukri Ghanem relayed by Mediapart deliver a completely different version. The former minister of Gaddafi reports that two senior Libyan intelligence officials have inoculated the AIDS virus to these children. They would have obtained these “vials of contagious virus” and would have poisoned the children of the hospital in order to fabricate a health, humanitarian and diplomatic tragedy, and to blame it on the West.
At the time, the regime was being prosecuted for two terrorism cases – the attack on UTA’s DC10 which killed 171 victims, including 54 French, on September 19, 1989, and the Lockerbie attack in 1988. It was act for Gaddafi’s Libya to divert attention and pose as a victim. According to these notes, the head of state also wanted revenge on Benghazi, a city rebellious to the regime.
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