Rescuers work to help survivors amid the devastation brought in by a
bomb explosion in Al-Qaeda's first major international attack near the
US embassy and a bank in Nairobi ON August 7, 1998 that killed about 200
people and left more than 1,000 injured. Kenya's President Kibaki has
said the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is an "act of justice"
for the victims of the 1998 bombing at the US embassy in Kenya,
Photo/AF
By KEVIN J KELLEY Special Correspondent
In Summary
- Sudan shares responsibility for the attacks that killed 224 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and injured thousands more.
- The governments of Iran and Sudan are unlikely to voluntarily make the payments ordered on July 25
An attorney for hundreds of East African victims
of the 1998 US embassy bombings has said they “need to have patience
and determination” in collecting $8 billion from Iran and Sudan recently
awarded to them by a US court.
“We believe we’re going to obtain it,” declared
Chicago-based attorney, Gavriel Mairone. “If we are lucky, it could
happen in as little as two years.”
Mr Mairone has extensive experience in cases
involving terror attacks. His law firm represents more than 12,000
victims in a total of 26 countries. He says he abandoned his tax law
practice 14 years ago in order to focus on representing individuals
affected by war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
“I travel a lot and saw too much suffering. I decided I had to do something about it,” said Mr Mairone
The governments of Iran and Sudan are unlikely to
voluntarily make the payments ordered on July 25, he acknowledges. But
Mr Mairone said the awards to a total of 570 embassy bomb victims could
take the form of Iranian and Sudanese assets seized in the United States
or other countries.
Assets identification
Mr Mairone said he and other attorneys involved in
the case have begun legal proceedings to identify assets such as bank
accounts and real estate held by Iran and Sudan and not protected under
the legal principle of “sovereign immunity.”
The countries’ embassies, for example, cannot be
seized to satisfy the judgments issued in federal court in Washington DC
by Judge Thomas Bates.
In general, however, “judgments are notoriously
difficult to collect in state-sponsored terrorism cases,” Legal Times, a
US law journal, reported in regard to a $957 million award that Judge
Bates ordered in April in a related case.
Iran and Sudan are both liable for the attacks in
Kenya and Tanzania 16 years ago because of the assistance they provided
to Al-Qaeda operatives, Judge Bates ruled in 2011.
“Support from Iran and Hezbollah [a Lebanese
militia] was critical to Al-Qaeda’s execution of the 1998 embassy
bombings,” the judge wrote.
“Before its meetings with Iranian officials and
agents, Al-Qaeda did not possess the technical expertise required to
carry out the embassy bombings. In the 1990s, Al-Qaeda received training
in Iran and Lebanon on how to destroy large buildings with
sophisticated and powerful explosives,” the judge added.
Sudan shares responsibility for the attacks that
killed 224 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and injured thousands more,
Judge Bates found.
“Sudan harboured and provided sanctuary to terrorists and their operational and logistical supply network,” he ruled.
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