Libya's former Justice Minister has stated that not the Bulgarian medics, but the regime of leader Muammar Gaddafi was responsible for infecting more than 400 children with HIV.

Mustafa Abudel-Jalil made this statement late Wednesday for Al Jazeera, the Bulgarian daily "24 Chasa" reported.

Abdel-Jalil said that the scandal involving Bulgarian medics was just one of the several serious crimes conducted by Gaddafi's regime against his own people.

"Finally, the truth that we tried for 8 years to prove in Libya has surfaced," said Plamen Yalnazov, the lawyer of the Bulgarian medics during the trial, in which they were charged with infecting 400 Libyan children with HIV.

"I have always known that the truth will eventually come out because the trial was fixed from the very beginning. The whole story with our medics was a total racket. Such regimes are unscrupulous and can really destroy not only 400, but tens of thousands of people and then blame someone else," said Georgi Gatev, the other lawyer in the trial.

Six Bulgarian medics and a Palestinian doctor were arrested in 1999 and were accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital in Benghazi.

They were sentenced to death twice. In July 2007, the involvement of the Sarkozy couple in the final stages of the talks has been deemed crucial in Bulgaria and the medics were released after spending eight years in a Libyan prison.

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