Sudan to appeal verdict in USS Cole bombing case

July 27, 2007 (KHARTOUM) —Sudan said on Thursday it would appeal a U.S. court verdict that ordered Khartoum to pay some $8 million to the families of U.S. sailors killed in the bombing of an American naval destroyer seven years ago in Yemen.

“We will appeal the ruling,” Sudan’s Justice Minister Mohammed Ali al-Mardi told Reuters.

He said his ministry would review the court verdict and ask Sudan’s lawyers to challenge it.

A U.S. judge ordered Sudan on Wednesday to pay almost $8 million to the families of the 17 sailors who were killed when al Qaeda militants bombed the USS Cole, which was docked in Yemen in 2000.

“The court finds as a fact by substantial evidence that Sudan’s material support to al Qaeda led to the murders of the seventeen American servicemen and woman,” Judge Robert Doumar, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in his ruling.

But Mardi denied Sudan was involved in the bombing.

“We had nothing to do with the bombing of the Cole. We neither took part nor incited it,” the minister said.

The Sudanese government initially did not respond to the lawsuit, but then tried to have it dismissed. Lawyers for Sudan attended the two-day trial in March but only made an argument about damages and renewed its request to dismiss the case.

Mardi said the United States had no right to try another sovereign state.

“The ruling violates international law. We are a sovereign state and we cannot be tried in a U.S. court,” the minister said.

Payment could come from some $68.2 million in Sudanese assets that are in the United States and have been frozen because of what Washington cites as the country’s links to terrorism.

(Reuters)