BULGARIA/FILE: Ashraf Alhajouj, the Palestinian doctor who was released from Libya with several Bulgarian nurses after being imprisoned on accusations of infecting Libyan children with the HIV virus, marries a Bulgarian woman

Ashraf Alhajouj, the Palestinian doctor who was released from Libya with several Bulgarian nurses after being imprisoned for eight years on accusations of infecting Libyan children with the HIV virus, strengthens his links with his adoptive country, Bulgaria, by marrying a Bulgarian woman. A Palestinian doctor, who had faced execution in Libya over accusations of infecting hundreds of children with HIV, married a Bulgarian on Saturday (December 1) as he sought a new start after eight years in captivity. Ashraf Alhajouj, 38, and five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death on charges of deliberately starting an HIV epidemic in Libya were freed on July 24 after the European Union brokered a cooperation deal with Tripoli. The six have always maintained their innocence and said they confessed under torture. The grey-haired Alhajouj met his future wife, 30-year-old engineer Olya Megova, a week after his liberation and said he fell in love at first sight. Several weeks later he proposed. "Let God keep our love alive, bless us with children and let us live a long life," the doctor told reporters at the ceremony in his broken Bulgarian which he learned from his fellow prisoners. Sofia's maverick mayor Boiko Borisov, a former bodyguard to Bulgaria's late communist dictator, married the two in his office. The couple later threw a lavish party for their guests, including Alhajouj's parents, who live in the Netherlands, the nurses, senior Bulgarian politicians and popular figures. Alhajouj, who recently received Bulgarian citizenship, said earlier this week he wanted to live in the Balkan country and work as a doctor again. When asked by reporters if he envisaged any problems with marrying a Christian woman, Alhajouj, who is a Muslim, said: "I don't think that there is any problem with different religions". "As much as we are from two religions, we can live together," he added. Tripoli jailed Alhajouj, who was born in Egypt but spent most of his life in Libya, in 1999 just two months before he was due to complete his internship in a hospital in the city of Benghazi where the HIV outbreak occurred. The doctor says he will never forgive his Libyan jailers who he said had tortured him by giving him electric shocks to confess that he deliberately infected children with the virus that causes AIDS.

ITN Source | December 3, 2007

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