A Bulgarian prosecutor filed charges against 11 Libyan police officers for allegedly torturing the five Bulgarian nurses who have been sentenced to death in Libya.

So far fifty people have been interrogated, including witnesses and journalists. "What they have been put through was done in the Middle Ages," Aksinia Matosian, a Bulgarian prosecutor told reporters today.

"After completing the necessary police investigation, we believe there is enough evidence proving a crime," Sofia prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov told AFP on Tuesday.

He said he would be bringing charges in Bulgaria against the 11 Libyan police officers, opening the way to a judicial investigation which itself could lead to a trial.

"They will be accused of extracting confessions under duress," Kokinov said.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad in December 2006 after a court in Tripoli found them guilty of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV at a hospital in the northeastern Libyan town of Benghazi.

The verdicts against the six foreigners, who have already spent eight years in a Libyan prison, were handed down on the basis of confessions by two of the nurses.

But the nurses recanted their confessions during the trial, saying they had been made under force.

The six medics maintain their innocence on the basis of testimony by international health experts. The experts claim the AIDS virus spread because of poor hygiene in the hospital and that this took place before the nurses' arrived there.

The nurses' Libyan lawyer, Othman al-Bizanti, told AFP on Monday his clients have also been accused of slandering police and face questioning on February 11.

Bulgaria's Chief Prosecutor Boris Velchev told journalists Tuesday that the new slander charges were "an obscenity".

"The evidence that we have points out that the nurses were indeed tortured. Nobody in Bulgaria has any doubts about that," Velchev said.

The coordinator of the Bulgarian defence team, Trayan Markovski, called the slander charges "the latest psychological torture against our innocently condemned nurses".

Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev said on national radio that he feared the new charges would "complicate the grave psychological state of the nurses".

"That is the next dreadful slap in the face we were given," Zdravko Georgiev, a Bulgarian doctor and husband of one of the nurses, told the national radio Tuesday.

"These beasts, our torturers, are the ones who have slandered the girls," he said.

Georgiev was detained together with the five nurses but a Tripoli court acquitted him in May 2004 as he had already served out the four-year sentence he received. But he has not been allowed to leave Libya.

The plight of the medics, the so-called "Benghazi Six", has sparked outrage, with both the European Union and the United States calling for them to be freed.

The case also threatens to hinder the normalisation of Libya's relations with the international community.

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