The spectacle of the French president's wife flying to Tripoli to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor threatens to obscure the real significance of this event, the Financial Times commented a week after the six medics returned on home soil.

The author Andrew Moravcsik points out that the medics were wrongly accused of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV. According to him at a deeper level, the release of the medics is a victory for a decade-long European strategy of engaging rather than invading countries such as Libya.

"The nurses are free today because Muammer Gadaffi - and, more importantly, the next generation of Libyan leaders represented by his son, Saif al-Islam al-Gadaffi - want to deepen further a process of engagement with the west launched in the mid-1990s. ... The deal over the freed medics is the fruit of years of negotiation with Britain, France and Brussels," Andrew Moravcsik says.