Securing Sh700b for US embassy bomb victims not easy, says lawyer

Rescuers near the US embassy that was bombed on August 7, 1998.

Lawyers who won the Sh700 billion award for victims of the 1998 bomb attack have conceded the harder part of getting Sudan and Iran to pay up had only started.

Gavriel Mairone told The Standard yesterday on phone that "we are closer to our destination than where we started" the landmark case nearly 15 years ago.

"The settlement could come in a couple of years but we are almost there," said Mr Mairone, whose firm MM_AM had represented 570 plaintiffs.

Fresh litigation had been instituted that would enable the lawyers to attach assets of the two countries.

"We have records of several assets that are targets, including Sh170 billion ($2 billion) held in a New York bank account belonging to Iran," Mairone said.

The lawyers are seeking to attach $8.6 billion-worth of assets owned by both Sudan and Iran.

One hundred and fourteen of the plaintiffs were survivors of the twin blasts that went off almost simultaneously in Kenya and Tanzania, targeting US embassies, Mairone adds.

Five other law firms were also involved in the case.

Monicah Okoba Opati, Milly Mikali Ambudso, Mary Onsongo and Winfred Wairimu Wamai were the main complainants in four different suits before they were collapsed into one.

"We are certain that the plaintiffs will collect a significant portion of these claims, if not all," said Mairone, reassuring the Kenyan plaintiffs who had been left out of earlier awards.

In a ruling delivered by the same court in April, for instance, Tanzanian and American victims were awarded Sh77 billion while the Kenyan counterparts were excluded despite having suffered the biggest loss of lives and property. In Nairobi, 213 people died compared to 11 in Dar es Salaam.

Four judges sitting in a court in Washington DC gave the award which is one of the largest compensation in history.

"Reviewing their personal stories reveals that, even more than fifteen years later, they each still feel the horrific effects of that awful day," read the ruling delivered by John Bates, a district judge.

The victims had sued the governments of Iran and Sudan under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, accusing the two countries of helping terrorists produce "calculated mayhem" that caused them untold pain.

Plaintiffs, victims of the bombings and their families filed cases against the Republic of Sudan, the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Sudan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security for their roles in supporting and funding terror attacks.

The judges ruled that the Government of Iran conspired with Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda to launch large-scale bombing attacks against the United States.

Bin Laden, the mastermind of the twin terror attacks, did not possess the technical expertise required to carry out the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, the judges ruled.

Sudan was found guilty of harbouring and providing sanctuary to terrorists and their operational and logistical supply network.

Sudan had responded to the accusations levelled against it, but its arguments were thrown out, Mairone told The Standard.

Iran, which did not file a response in court, is yet to pay nearly Sh1.5 trillion ($18 billion) it already owes from other judgments in terrorism cases in the same court.

Mairone, however, said Libya was in 1998 forced to settle a $1.5 billion award given to victims of the Lockerbie bombing which claimed 270 lives.