California – US Appeals Court: Terror Victims Can Seize $9.4 Million Of Iran Funds

California – In a race to be the first terror victims in US history to actually collect damages from Iran, a group of victims of a 1997 triple suicide bombing in Jerusalem won a major $9.4 million US appeals court judgment.

The Ninth Circuit Appellate Court which handles appeals from California court decisions, handed down the judgment on Friday, in favor of a group of victims represented by Shurat Hadin’s Nitsana Darshan-Leitner in Israel and David Strachman of Rhode Island as US counsel.

When a $9.4 million judgment lien was originally entered in favor of the families of the victims of the attack in 2013 by a lower US federal court in California, it was the first time that such victims had found Iranian assets in the US which could actually be transferred to them.

The $9.4 million stems from years of interest and fees on top of a $2.8 million base judgment.

However, Iran appealed to the Ninth Circuit appeals court and since then the US Supreme Court in January heard the separate Peterson case” in which the bet is that a wider group of American victims of Iranian-linked terror will receive $2 billion in Iranian funds.

That means the race is on between the two cases about who will collect against Iran first.

However, with Iran vowing to appeal Friday’s judgment to the US Supreme Court, the Peterson case is likely to culminate first – unless the US Supreme Court denies Iran’s right to appeal Friday’s judgment outright.

Shurat Hadin also represents victims in the Peterson case.

The NGO helped the American families of those wounded in the attacks to begin legal proceedings against Iran in 2001 for their sponsorship of Hamas, who claimed credit for the Ben Yehuda street attack.

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.

Darshan-Leitner stated, “this is a historic court ruling against Iran. While governments around the world, including the Obama administration, are falling over themselves trying to throw money at the outlaw regime in Tehran, these families of the victims are still fighting to bankrupt this state sponsor of terrorism.”

“The Islamic Republic needs to understand that these court judgments have not been canceled and that the terror victims will continue to pursue them in legal forums all over the world. They don’t forgive and they aren’t going to forget either,” she said. 

The Iranian funds which Shurat Hadin managed to seek out is a story in itself.

The original purpose of the funds was a judgment in favor of Iran (through proxies) against Cubic Defense Systems, a US company which had contracts with pre-revolutionary Iran to sell it an air combat maneuvering range systems.

Pre-revolutionary Iran had paid Cubic $12 million for which Cubic was about to deliver much of the equipment when the 1979 Iranian revolution broke out, cutting off US-Iran relations and scuttling implementation of the deal.

In the 1990s, Iran and Cubic engaged in international arbitration over the deal, leading to allowing Cubic to sell the equipment to another country, but also eventually requiring Cubic to pay $2.8 million plus a much larger amount of interest to Iran.

In 2003, the daughter of former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar filed a lien to take title to Iran’s judgment in light of a judgment she had obtained against Iran, and the Shurat Hadin plaintiffs did the same.

Although Iran claimed sovereign immunity to these judgment liens jumping in and “taking away” its own judgment, Shurat Hadin was able to beat that defense using recent changes to related laws by Congress which waive any sovereign immunity defense in certain cases involving international terrorism.

Further, whereas in the past, agreements and presidential orders between the US and Iran regarding assets in dispute because of the 1979 revolution prevented victims of terror from seizing certain Iranian assets, here, the court determined that Iran’s rights to a judgment against Cubic did not really exist until 1998 – pushing away the usual obstacles.

The win was also noteworthy as it could be seen as flying in the face of the new US-Iran rapprochement post the nuclear weapons deal struck on July 14.