I was in Tripoli, Libya, wiping sweat off my forehead. Sitting across from me in a back room of the Bulgarian embassy was a doctor named Zdravko Georgiev. In 1999, he and his wife, a nurse, had been arrested along with four other Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medical intern. They had been charged with bioterrorism, accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 children at a Libyan hospital with HIV. Georgiev, who had been working for a company on the other side of the country, had been released a few months earlier after having spent four years in prison, but the other medical workers, later dubbed the Tripoli Six, were waiting for death by firing squad.
It was a few days before Christmas three years ago, and it wasn’t hot—the Libyan capital is pleasant in December. I was sweating because Georgiev was describing what the Libyan police had done to ...
