Six foreign medics convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV have left Libya for Sofia, officials said on Tuesday, in a move likely to boost Tripoli`s relations with the West. "They have left their airport in Libya and are now flying ... We expect in them in Sofia," Deputy Foreign Minister Feim Chaushev told Reuters. Last week a Libyan judicial council commuted the death sentences against the six, convicted of deliberately infecting more than 400 children at a Benghazi hospital, to life imprisonment after the victims` families received a $460 million settlement. That opened the way for the medics -- five Bulgarians and a Palestinian who recently took Bulgarian citizenship -- to return home under a 1984 prisoner exchange agreement. Once in Bulgaria, they could be pardoned by the country`s president, Georgi Parvanov. Chaushev said the medics, who spent over eight years in Libyan jail, were accompanied by EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and France`s First Lady Cecilia Sarkozy. The two were in Tripoli to help release the medics, who say they are innocent. Their plane was expected to arrive in Sofia at around 0700 GMT, Chaushev said. AID AND POLITICAL TIES A Libyan close to the negotiations said on Tuesday the medics left after a deal was reached with the European Union on medical aid and political ties. "There was agreement on equipping the hospital in Benghazi and treatment for the children ...All the political matters have been met," the Libyan contacted by telephone from Algiers said. A statement by the French presidency said the medics were being flown on a French jet to Sofia. "The French President, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, and the President of the European Commission, Mr Jose Manuel Barroso, welcome the agreement that has at last allowed this release and the return to Bulgaria of the nurses held for more than eight years, and of the Palestinian doctor," the statement said. The European Commission welcomed Libya`s "humanitarian" decision, as well as what it said was "the implementation of an improved framework to ensure the care dispensed to the children victim of AIDS in Libya." The commission said the Gulf state of Qatar had also helped mediate the agreement. Libya emerged from decades of isolation in 2003 when it scrapped a program of prohibited weapons and returned to international mainstream politics. The country has begun opening its big energy reserves to foreign oil firms and the United States said this month it was sending its first ambassador to Tripoli in 35 years.