SOFIA (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday received Bulgaria's top honor for helping to free Bulgarian nurses from a Libyan jail.

The five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, who had been sentenced to death on accusations of deliberately infecting 460 Libyan children with HIV, were freed a year ago after the European Union brokered a cooperation deal with Tripoli.

The United States had made the release of the six, who spent more than eight years in jail, a priority and Rice said she had repeatedly raised the issue with Libyan officials.

"I am glad that they are home safe," Rice said after Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov presented her with the "Stara Planina" medal. "It was indeed a terrible ordeal, one that I am very glad has ended."

The medal, created during the communist era, was once given to foreign dignitaries like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his ex-wife, Cecilia, received it for their role in the HIV case last year.

Bulgaria and its allies in Brussels and Washington had suggested not freeing the nurses would hurt Libya's efforts to emerge from more than three decades of diplomatic isolation imposed for what the West called its support of terrorism.

Before flying on to Georgia, Rice met two of the nurses and the Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Alhajouj, who was granted Bulgarian citizenship last year, in the U.S. embassy in Sofia.

Alhajouj asked Rice for U.S. support to clear their names and get compensation from Libya. The six have always maintained their innocence and said they were tortured to confess.

Washington has dramatically improved relations with Tripoli since it abandoned a banned weapons program in 2003, dropping many U.S. sanctions, removing it from a U.S. terrorism blacklist and restoring diplomatic links after decades of enmity.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed and Anna Mudeva; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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