The French Ambassador to Bulgaria, Etienne de Poncins, is meeting for lunch Friday at the French residence in Sofia, the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor, who spent over eight years in Libyan prison.

The lunch is on the occasion of the second anniversary of their release from jail.

The medics were jailed over accusations of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV.

Kristiyana Valcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, Doctor Zdravko Georgiev and Palestinian, Ashraf Al-Hadjudj, landed on Bulgarian soil by the aircraft of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy shortly before 10 am on July 24, 2007.

Relatives, Bulgarian media, President Parvanov, now outgoing PM Sergey Stanishev, other high state officials and thousands of Sofia citizen welcomed the nurses and the two doctors at the Sofia Airport hours after their release was announced.

EU's External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the former French First Lady, Cecilia Sarkozy, and Elysee Secretary General Claude Guéant, who led the last tough talks with Libyan leader Muammar Quadaffi arrived to Bulgaria on board of the same plane.

On July 17, 2007, the Lybian Supreme Judicial Council changed the medics' dead sentences to life in prison and allowed them to serve those sentences in Bulgaria. Less than an hour after the medics descended the plane, President Parvanov issued a special order with which he pardoned them.

The six medical staff, who have been imprisoned since 1999, have been convicted of deliberately infecting 460 children with HIV at the Benghazi hospital and were twice sentenced to death.

The medics, who said their confessions were made under duress, were the subject of a high-profile international lobbying campaign. International experts blamed the HIV infections on pre-existing hygiene problems at the hospital where the children contracted the virus.

The decision from the Libyan Supreme Judiciary Council came after families of the children infected with the HIV virus started to receive compensations. The families had said the same day that they dropped their demand for the death penalty.

This was part of a deal organised by the Quaddafi Foundation, a charity which has been involved in mediating a resolution to the case. In return for the money, the relatives have signed a declaration handed over to the Supreme Judiciary Council, saying they no longer insist on the death penalty being carried out.

Despite the elation over their release and their welcomed return to Bulgaria, the life of the medics in the last two years has been surrounded by controversy with many blaming them for trying to profit from their fate to get benefits from the Stage.

On their part, the medics say the State did not keet all the promises given to them upon their arrival home.

On July 24, 2008, the day of the first anniversary of their return to Bulgaria, part of them staged a vigil before the building of the Council of Ministers in the hope of being accepted by then Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev to question him about the unfulfilled promises.

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