US court allows USS Cole victims families case vs Sudan
Sept 1, 2006 (RICHMOND) — A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday kept alive a lawsuit against the Republic of Sudan filed by the families of the 17 sailors killed in the terrorist attack on the Navy destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Sudan’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, which alleges that the East African nation’s government provided financial and training support to al-Qaida, including the Yemeni militants who planned the attack on the Norfolk-based destroyer in the Aden, Yemen, harbor on Oct. 12, 2000.
The three-judge panel also dismissed the remainder of Sudan’s appeal of the lawsuit, which also alleges that the Cole attack was part of a decade-long plan of international terrorism against the U.S., and that Sudan was part of that conspiracy. It also alleges that between 1991 and 1996, Sudan provided shelter and a safe haven for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Through the lawsuit, the Cole victims’ wives, parents and nine children seek $105 million, which the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Andrew C. Hall, has said could be paid from Sudanese assets frozen by the U.S. government.
John Clodfelter, whose 21-year-old son, Kenneth, was killed in the attack, is glad to see the families’ action against Sudan proceed.
“It really means a whole lot to all the families, not just us,” Clodfelter of Mechanicsville, Virginia, said in a telephone interview. “There were wives that had to move in with each other because they didn’t have the funds” beyond what the Defense Department gave them to compensate for their husbands’ deaths.
Sudan’s attorneys had argued that the lawsuit should be thrown out because it doesn’t directly connect any al-Qaida support to the Cole bombing, and fails to connect any official or agent of Sudan to support for the terrorist network.
But the appeals panel rejected those arguments, and ruled that while the families’ allegations “do not chart a direct and unbroken factual line between Sudan’s actions and the bombing” they do establish a reasonable connection between a country providing material support to a terrorist group and the damage arising out of a subsequent terrorist attack.
Telephone and e-mail messages left Friday afternoon for Hall and Douglas Knox Bemis, a lawyer representing Sudan in the lawsuit, weren’t immediately returned.
Foreign nations ordinarily are immune from lawsuits in U.S. courts, but Congress amended the law in 1996 to allow victims to seek monetary damages against countries classified as state sponsors of terrorism.
The U.S. State Department continues to list Sudan among six countries classified as state terrorism sponsors, but credits its government with taking significant steps to cooperate in fighting terrorism. Under U.S. pressure, Sudan threw out bin Laden in 1996.
The families’ lawsuit alleges that al-Qaida operated training camps in Sudan and that the country allowed an operative of the global terrorism network to ship four crates of explosives to Yemen before the Cole bombing. It also accuses Sudan’s president of authorizing bin Laden’s entry into his country and says bin Laden and Sudan operated joint businesses and a bank that provided financing for the Cole attack.
(AP/ST)