WarSclerotic

US court orders Iran to pay $9 million to families of 1997 Jerusalem terror attack victims | JPost | Israel News.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST.COM STAFF

12/04/2013 14:23

NGO wins 1st potential seizure of Iranian funds in US; Actual transfer of funds could still be blocked by appeal and the current diplomatic process.

For the first time in US history, victims of Iranian financed terror operations in Israel won a potential seizure of Iranian funds to satisfy a default judgment against Iran relating to a 1997 triple suicide bombing in Jerusalem, NGO Shurat Hadin – Israel Law Center announced on Wednesday.

The $9 million judgment entered in favor of the families of the five victims of the attack by a US federal court in California on November 27, is the first time that such victims have found Iranian assets in the US which could be and may actually be transferred to them.

The organization helped the American families of five of those wounded in the attacks to begin legal proceedings against Iran in 2001 for their sponsorship of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group which claimed credit for the attack on Ben Yehuda Street.

On September 4, 1997, three Hamas operatives set off explosives attached to their bodies as they wandered into the packed Ben Yehuda Street promenade in the middle of the afternoon, killing five Israelis and wounding scores of others. Three of those killed were 14-year-old girls.

“This is a tremendous victory for the victims of Islamic terrorism,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, said in a statement. “While the the US and EU are rushing out to economically bolster the outlaw regime in Tehran,  we and the families we represent do not forgive nor forget the Iranian funded terror that devastated Israel.”

“We still remember the heinous murders carried out by the Iranian proxy, Hamas, in 1997. We are still fighting every single day for a measure of justice and compensation from the outlaw regimes that supported the terror organizations.”

Still, in a complex decision, the court simultaneously rejected Shurat Hadin’s request for the immediate transfer of the funds, explicitly staying any transfer until Iran files its appeal.

An appeal involving the numerous complex legal issues and decades of history in the case, which has pieces nearly dating back to the 1979 Iranian revolution itself, could take an undefined amount of time.

Also, the court explicitly recognized that any final transfer of the funds would have to take into account the current diplomatic process with Iran, another potential roadblock to the funds transfer.

Still even an order officially giving the victims’ families title to the funds in theory, if not in practice, is a first in Shurat Hadin’s decade long struggle to not only win judgments on Iran-related terror financing cases for the victims’ families, but to also find actual assets to satisfy the judgments.

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