Libya is the land of make-believe, and from a safe distance it can seem comical. The 65-year-old teenager who runs the place, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, has an even stronger commitment to fashion than my 15-year-old daughter (although she has much better taste): his outfits are to die for. But it’s a very ugly regime close up.

After eight years in a Libyan jail, Kristiana Valcheva was woken at four in the morning on Tuesday and told that she would be freed. Two hours later she was on her way home to Bulgaria, where President Georgi Parvanov ‘pardoned’ her, four other Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor for the crimes that they had never committed.

Over a period of several years in the late-Nineties, 438 children in a Benghazi hospital, in eastern Libya, were infected by HIV-contaminated blood transfusions. By now, 56 of the children have died of AIDS. Similar tragedies have happened in other countries, and those who made the mistakes have been disciplined — but this was Libya, where it’s always the fault of foreign enemies if things go wrong.

The HIV infections, which began before the six scapegoats arrived in Libya, were probably due to poor hygiene in the hospital. But the foreigners were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Early this month, however, as part of a deal with the European Union, the Libyan high court commuted their sentence to life imprisonment and allowed them to go to Bulgaria to serve out their terms. On arrival in Sofia, they were immediately pardoned, and the case was closed.

Nobody admitted any blame, nobody lost face, and no blackmail was paid. The fact that each of the 438 Libyan families involved will get $1 million from EU sources is purely coincidental. Gaddafi may be a head case, but Libya still has some oil, so his peccadilloes are overlooked. And before people in other places start feeling superior, let us recall another case involving Libya in which some shifting of blame may have occurred.

The devil’s due

On December 21, 1988, Pan American flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Most were Americans, and it was initially suspected that Iran carried out the operation in revenge for the killing of 290 Iranians, six months earlier, aboard a civilian Iran Air flight that was shot down by a US warship in the Gulf.

US and British investigators started building a case against Iran and Syria. But a year-and-a-half later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, turning overnight from an ally to an enemy of America. In the US-led war to liberate Kuwait, the cooperation of Iran and Syria was vital — so, suddenly, the Lockerbie investigation shifted focus to Libya, and in due course (about ten years) two Libyan intelligence agents were brought to trial for the crime.

In 2001, one of them, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland. Libya paid $2.7 billion in “compensation” to the victims’ families, without ever admitting guilt, but the verdict always smelled fishy. Jim Swire, father of one of the victims on Pan Am 103, said, “I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out thinking [al-Megrahi] had been framed.”

Late last month, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission declared al-Megrahi’s conviction “unsafe” and granted him the right to appeal the verdict because “the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.” That may well be true, and it may not have been an accident either. But, as former British ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, told the BBC recently, “No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence.”

And so it goes.