SOFIA, Oct 23, 2007 (AFP) - Bulgaria awarded one of its highest honour Tuesday to the Italian HIV/AIDS researcher Vittorio Colizzi, whose medical testimony helped free six Bulgarian medics in a Libyan AIDS case scandal.
Colizzi helped proved that hundreds of children in a Libyan hospital were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a result of poor hygiene and the multiple use of infected syringes at the hospital and not by any deliberate action by five Bulgarian nurses and a doctor of Palestinian origin.
The Italian scientist was awarded the foreign ministry's golden laurel by deputy foreign minister, Feim Chaushev, on Tuesday.
The six medics, who always maintained their innocence, had spent eight years in a Libyan jail charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at a hospital in the northeastern city of Benghazi.
They had received triple life sentences, but were finally released in July in the wake of the international furore that the case had sparked.
Colizzi and the French virologist Luc Montagnier, who is credited with co-discovering the HIV virus, had been called to testify in a Libyan court at an early stage of the trial.
They presented scientific proof that the AIDS outbreak had been caused by poor hygiene and the multiple use of infected syringes long before the arrival of the six foreigners in 1998. And they also found no evidence of deliberate infection.
Their testimony was ultimately disregarded by the Libyan court, but it unleashed a wave of solidarity in scientific circles around the world, with a series of articles published in Nature magazine on the transmission of AIDS.
"As a scientist I did not work for the Bulgarian nurses, I worked for the truth. But the truth in this case was with the nurses," Colizzi said Tuesday.
Montagnier also received the foreign ministry's golden laurel award in September.
Bulgaria has similarly decorated a number of other people for their role in the medics' release, including EU Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Cecilia Sarkozy.
HIV pioneer Montagnier has vowed to continue his research to prove the innocence of the Bulgarians to Libya itself, which still holds the medics responsible for the outbreak.
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