US judge: Iran behind 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia, must pay $104.7m in damages
A Washington court claims Iran has had a role in the bombing of a housing complex in Saudi Arabia’s eastern city of Khobar, which killed US military personnel, ordering Tehran to pay over $104 million in damages.
Issuing a default judgment on Monday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ordered that the sum should go to the victims of the attack that killed 19 US military personnel members, Reuters said.
Chief Judge Beryl Howell also said 15 service members, who were at the complex at the time of the attack, could recover “for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” the agency added.
She further found 24 survivors entitled to claim damages for “emotional distress from seeing how the bombing affected their loved ones.”
In December 2006, another federal judge in Washington ordered Iran to pay $254.4 million to the survivors of 17 of those killed in the bombing.
On August 26, 2015, Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported that Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mughassil, the main suspect in the bombing, had been arrested in Lebanon and sent to Saudi Arabia for interrogation.
Back in 2001, the Saudi man had been indicted by a US court for the Khobar attack.
The Islamic Republic is yet to comment on the issue.
Iran was designated by the US Department of State as a “state sponsor of terrorism” in January 1984.
Back in May, a New York court ordered Tehran to pay $6 billion to 9/11 survivors.
At the time, Iran’s Foreign Ministry reacted by saying that those behind “political games” such as the one that saw Manhattan federal Judge George Daniels issue the ruling were uselessly trying to rewrite history.
Of the 19 hijackers that allegedly carried out the attacks, 15 were Saudi nationals and available evidence suggests some of them were linked to high-ranking Saudi officials.
In 2016, Iran sued the US at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad, which US courts had claimed should go to American victims of “terror attacks.”
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