Judge Orders Syria and Iran to Pay $332M in State-Sponsored Terrorism Case

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  • Judge Orders Syria and Iran to Pay $332M in State-Sponsored Terrorism Case
    http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2012/05/judge-orders-syria-and-iran-to-pay-332m-in-state-sponsored-terro

    In what one attorney calls the first judgment of its kind, U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth recently ordered Iran and Syria to pay $332 million for their role in a 2006 suicide attack in Israel that killed eleven people.

    The family of Daniel Wultz, an American sixteen-year-old killed in the attack, sued the Iranian and Syrian government in 2008 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wultz family accused both countries of providing financial and other material support to the group responsible for the attack, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

    In an opinion (PDF)opinion published Monday, Lamberth found that both countries were liable for the attack under the state-sponsored terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Robert Tolchin of the Berman Law Office in Brooklyn, NY, the Wultz family’s lawyer, said he believed this was the first judgment ever entered in a U.S. court against Syria for supporting a terrorist attack in Israel.