Wales Tourism and Visit Planning

Holiday In Wales Friday, 16th December 2005
Financial Times

By Guy Dinmorein Washingon

American victims of the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut said yesterday they were planning to take legal action against Iran through European courts following a similar case that has already resulted in the freezing of Iranian assets held in a Rome bank account.

Twenty-nine victims of the suicide truck bomb that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, won a court ruling on Wednesday in the US district court for Washington that Iran should pay $126m in damages.

The judge, in a 94-page opinion, cited evidence showing Iran had provided Hizbollah - the perpetrators of the Beirut attack - with arms, financial aid and other support.

The US government says there are no Iranian assets frozen in the US that can be used as compensation. As a result the plaintiffs are planning to target Iranian funds in Europe, where Iran has diplomatic and business ties.

A precedent was set last week when a civil court in Rome adopted a US court ruling that ordered Iran to compensate three American families for their relatives killed by Palestinian suicide bombers allegedly backed by Iran. The Rome court ordered Banca Nazionale del Lavoro to freeze an account held by the Iranian government. The amount was not disclosed.

Iran lodged a diplomatic protest with Italy's foreign ministry. It also threatened financial retaliation, fearing a flood of similar lawsuits that could entangle its assets in Europe.

Michael Martinez, attorney for more than 80 plaintiffs linked to the 1983 Beirut bombing, said there were three reasons for choosing Italy: its independent judiciary, its acceptance of the concept of seeking legal redress for terrorist acts and the belief that Iran had a lot of assets in Italy from oil trading.

In 1996 the US Congress amended the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to permit American citizens to bring lawsuits against foreign states that had committed or supported terrorist acts and were deemed by the US State Department to be state sponsors of terrorism. That list presently includes Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Libya and Sudan.

The Defence Minister said that the "Great Satan and the Little Satan", or the United States and Israel, had embarked on a psychological warfare against Iran. Najjar, a veteran commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is tied to the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marines compound in Beirut airport in October 1983, which killed 241 Americans. He was in command of the IRGC expeditionary force in Lebanon when on October 23, 1983, 22 a.m., a suicide bomber drove a large water delivery truck loaded with explosives into the Marine Barracks, killing 241 U.S. service members.

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