Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Wednesday rejected calls from the West for the release of Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death for injecting children with the HIV virus.

“Everyone from the West comes to Libya, and says to me release the Bulgarian nurses. This means that our children died and this was not considered as important,” Gaddafi said.

“I swear to God I will not release them,” he told an Arab League summit in Algiers, attended by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death last year after being found guilty of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the deadly HIV virus that causes AIDS.

The verdicts were based on confessions that the nurses - who remain jailed - say were extracted under torture.

They prompted strong protests from the United States and the European Union and have hampered Libya’s efforts to renew normal ties with the West after decades of diplomatic isolation.

“When the court sentenced the Bulgarians to death by hanging there were demonstrations (in Benghazi) supporting this sentence,” Gaddafi said. “They (the West) consider our people cheap.”

“The 47 children are dead and the others are still on the death bed,” Gaddafi said. “The Bulgarian nurses and a physician said to be Palestinian injected… children in the childrens hospital in Benghazi with the AIDS virus.”

The nurses, who have been imprisoned since 1999, say they are being used as scapegoats to prevent a backlash against medical authorities at the Benghazi hospital where they worked.

Late last year Tripoli suggested it would release the nurses in exchange for financial compensation. Bulgaria has refused, saying any pay out would be an admission of guilt.

The AIDS epidemic killed at least 40 of the 426 infected children and caused outrage in Libya.

AIDS experts have testified the epidemic began before the medics arrived at the hospital, possibly due to the unhygienic handling of needles and blood products.

In January nine Libyan police officers and a physician appeared in a Tripoli court on charges of torturing the five Bulgarian nurses to confess they infected the children.

Libyan lawyers and diplomats see the public trial of police officers as a move intended to counter foreign criticism of the Tripoli authorities.