that the way that I had dealt with the illness had been wrong... I made a big mistake... No way did I want my partner to be[come] infected." She stated that she concealed the infection to avoid hurting the success of her band. Benaissa has claimed she had been told by doctors that the risk of passing on the virus was "practically zero". Libya The HIV trial in Libya, also called 'the Bulgarian nurses affair', concerns the trials, appeals and eventual release of six foreign medical workers charged with conspiring to deliberately infect over 400 children with HIV in 1998, causing an epidemic at El-Fatih Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. The defendants, arrested in 1999, were one Palestinian medical intern and five Bulgarian nurses (often termed "medics"). All of the medics were heavily tortured for months to extract confessions. The torture process is described in details in the book Notes from Hell, co-written by Nikolay Yordanov and one of the nurses, Valya Chervianashka. As a result, three of the medics signed confessions. They were first sentenced to death, had their case remanded by Libya's highest court, and were sentenced to death again, which was upheld by Libya's highest court in early July 2007. A Libyan government panel later commuted their sentences to life in prison. The six were released following a deal reached with European Union representatives on humanitarian issues. The EU did not condone the guilty verdict in Libya against the six. On 24 July 2007, the five medics and the doctor were extradited to Bulgaria, where their sentences were commuted by the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov and they were freed. Libya has since complained about the releases, and the issue remains ongoing. Furthermore, a controversy has arisen concerning the terms of release, which allegedly include an arms trade as well as a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement signed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in July 2007. New Zealand New Zealand's first case for criminal HIV transmission occurred in 1993, when Peter Mwai, a Kenyan visiting New Zealand on a tourist visa, was sentenced to seven years in prison for infecting at least two women with HIV through unprotected sexual intercourse. Mwai came to New Zealand police attention after a woman reported she had contracted HIV after sleeping with him. Multiple women came forward saying they had unprotected sex with Mwai who had not told them he had HIV. At