SOFIA - President Nicolas Sarkozy received Bulgaria's top honour for his role in the freeing of Bulgarian medics from a Libyan jail on Thursday during a visit Paris hopes will help seal major commercial deals.
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Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death on accusations of deliberately infecting 460 Libyan children with HIV were freed on July 24 after the European Union brokered a cooperation deal with Tripoli.

Sarkozy had sent his wife Cecilia to Libya as his envoy.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov presented Sarkozy with the "Stara Planina" medal, the highest national honour.

"The tragedy of the Bulgarian medics was not only a tragedy of the Bulgarian people, but also of Europe and France," Sarkozy said after the ceremony. "Every European member should rely on the solidarity of the others."

The Sarkozys' role in the affair spurred controversy in France and irritated some EU officials who said the French president was claiming credit at the last minute after Brussels had spent three years patiently negotiating with Tripoli.

"If I had waited for everybody to give me permission to send Cecilia and a plane to bring the medics back, today we would have still talked about how unfair and tragic it was that the medics were still in jail," Sarkozy said during a lecture.

He said Cecilia was not accompanying him in Sofia because she did not want to fuel more controversy at home.

The medics' release opened the way for Sarkozy's visit to Tripoli which resulted in an arms deal and a memorandum of understanding for a nuclear energy deal. Sarkozy later denied any connection between the arms deal and the HIV case.

The medics, who met the French president later on Thursday, have always said they were innocent.

Sarkozy, who said in Hungary last month he wanted to build bridges with eastern Europe, discussed energy and shipbuilding cooperation with the Balkan country and lobbied for French interests in major deals.

Sarkozy said he expected Bulgaria to award French Armaris, controlled by state-owned shipyard DCN, a delayed 750 million euro contract to build four naval corvettes by year-end.

Sofia picked Armaris two years ago but has been postponing the deal, needed to strengthen its presence in the Black Sea basin, due to fiscal constraints.

French firms Electricite de France and Suez via its Belgian arm Electrabel, are bidding for a stake in a planned 5 billion euro nuclear power plant in Bulgaria.