The US Supreme Court on Wednesday waded into a sensitive case over whether the families of victims of attacks blamed on Iran should finally receive $1.75 billion in compensation from frozen Iranian funds. The survivors and representatives of more than 1,000 Americans victims of terrorism are demanding payment from funds of Iran's central bank being held at Citibank in New York.
All are victims of attacks that Iran is accused of financing or facilitating - including the deadliest attack against Americans prior to September 11, carried out in Beirut in 1983. Despite a long series of court rulings in the families' favour, extracting the compensation has remained a challenge. The case comes at an exceptionally delicate time diplomatically, six months after the two countries signed a historic agreement to curb Iran's nuclear program and only days before that accord is to take full effect.
The families include relatives of the 241 American soldiers killed in the October 1983 suicide bombings of the barracks of American and French soldiers attached to the multinational security force in Beirut. Fifty-eight Frenchmen also died. In July 2014, a US appeals court in New York ordered that $1.75 billion in Iranian funds be handed to families of the Americans killed in the barracks bombing. Funds identified as belonging to Iran, and involving various financial intermediaries including the Luxembourg group Clearstream, had been frozen in 2008. But amid fears that the funds might be spirited away, President Barack Obama issued a decree in early 2012 blocking any transfer, and a few months later Congress passed a law to require their seizure.
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