Libya had requested help and France, Italy and Switzerland had received some of the sick children. Eighty children were sent to France in May 1999. The Swiss paper Neue Zuercher Zeitung followed with the article "Bulgarians as Scapegoats" and the Washington Times picked up the story. In April 2001 the trial gained brief attention after Muammar Gaddafi gave his speech at the African summit on HIV/AIDS implicating the CIA. Cold War era GRU defector Viktor Suvorov would claim on Radio Free Europe that the conspiracy theory espoused by Gaddafi about CIA creating HIV and letting it loose in Africa had been invented by the KGB and was still promoted by Russian secret services, who were controlling Libya. This theory was widely published throughout the Balkans in Serbian and Greek newspaper articles. On 2 July 2001 The Washington Post ran a story by Peter Finn, interviewing Prof. Luc Perrin. Perrin dismissed the allegations of a deliberate infection, and WHO spokesperson Melinda Henry told the Post that members of WHO missions in Libya in 1998 and 1999 felt that further study was necessary, but they "were not invited back." The case continued to receive minor attention until the conclusion of the second trial and the imposition of the death penalty on 6 May 2004, which provoked a major reaction, and worldwide television coverage. Libyan recognition On 24 February 2011, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Libya's newly resigned Minister of Justice, told Al Jazeera that the responsibility for the HIV infection lies totally with Muammar Gaddafi's regime. However Abdul Jalil, who became head of the Libyan NTC and then de facto head of state after the assassination of Gaddafi, was one of the judges who twice upheld the nurses' death sentence. Timeline 27 January 2007: The Bulgarian newspaper 24 Часа reports that Gaddafi's elder son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi expressed hope that the death sentence could be halted and that "a satisfactory solution could be found." 15 February 2007: Dimitar Ignatov, a 25-year-old US citizen with Bulgarian origins, who launched two phony web pages for gathering money in support of Libya-jailed nurses, was arrested in a joint raid conducted by policemen from both countries. The money obtained in the scam had gone to his personal account in a Chicago bank. 17 February 2007: Lawyer Hari Haralampiev told Darik News that this was the last possible deadline for appealing the sentence before the Supreme Cassation Court of