Libya’s president has pardoned the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor who had been sentenced to death on trumped up charges of secretly spreading AIDS to children around the country.
Reuters has the timeline of this whole story, while the Los Angeles Times has a fuller description of the breaking news.
Many of us have been active in trying to raise awareness of the plight of these six innocent people, and help them get some justice after being tortured into confessing and spending over eight years in Libyan prison cells.
Now they have landed safely in Europe, and are soon to be back home.
Their hopes had grown very bleak before everything suddenly, amazingly turned into a fairytale finish at the last moment. There ought to be a word for the opposite of "catastrophe," because this is that.
As those of you familiar with the story know, the Libyan Supreme Court had upheld the medics’ death sentences in recent weeks, which spelled certain doom for them unless the executive branch of the government intervened. Thankfully, that’s what happened: The more moderate High Judicial Council commuted their death sentences just a few days ago, and now, just today, President Georgi Parvanov pardoned them entirely, right as their plane was landing in Bulgaria. They were greeted with cheers and bouquets.
(Actually there is a word for it: "Eucatastrophe," coined by JRR Tolkien. Leave it to him...)
As we know all too well, these kinds of stories usually turn out very sadly. Most never even get noticed in the first place by the world media and social justice activists around the globe. But this time it all worked out perfectly, notwithstanding the eight years these people gave out of their lives, and I feel so good for them to have been given their freedom back rather than sent to their deaths.
Thank you to everybody who helped make this happen. These six people would almost certainly have been put to death, safely beyond the watching eyes of the world, had we not intervened with such persistence and compassion.
The good guys won this one.
THE END