PARIS, October 15 (RIA Novosti) - Bulgaria's permanent delegate to UNESCO Irina Bokova is expected to be confirmed on Thursday as the first woman to head the United Nations agency for culture and education.

Bokova, 57, who is also Bulgaria's ambassador to France and Monaco, was chosen as UNESCO's new head on September 22 after five rounds of voting by the body's executive.

The longtime Bulgarian diplomat, who in the past served as the country's foreign minister, studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

She beat out front-runner Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, whose candidacy had caused outrage over a comment last year in which he said he would burn any Israeli book he found in Egypt's Library of Alexandria, Austria's Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European commissioner for external relations and European neighborhood policy, and another two candidates.

Russia put forward Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko for the post, but he withdrew from the race along with three other candidates after the second round of voting.

The Soviet Union joined UNESCO in 1954, but Moscow has never held the top job at the organization or any other United Nations body.

Libya said October 10 it will cut all forms of cooperation with UNESCO if the Bulgarian nominee is confirmed as the UNESCO new director general.

Experts have linked Libya's tough stance on the Bokova issue with a scandal involving five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were found guilty of infecting more than 400 children with the deadly HIV virus in a Bengazi hospital in the late 1990s.

Bulgaria, the European Union and the United States insisted that the defendants were being used as scapegoats to deflect attention from the poor state of Libya's health service.