The government of Sudan reached a $70 million settlement with victims’ family members and injured sailors from the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen’s Gulf of Aden.
The settlement is the latest in Sudan’s efforts to convince the United States to remove it from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The agreement, which was viewed by the Washington Examiner, includes $30.6 million for the deceased victims, as well as $39.4 million for the dozens of sailors who were injured.
The waterborne suicide attack by al Qaeda proved a morbid warning of the terror group’s potency less than a year before it hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Many issues related to the attack remain unresolved. The suspected mastermind, Saudi-born Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 55, is being held in Guantanamo Bay and still hasn’t been tried for his role.
“Sudan expresses sympathy to the victims of the Cole and their families,” Christopher Curran, an attorney representing Sudan, told the Washington Examiner. “But Sudan reaffirms that it was not involved in the attack on the Cole or in any other acts of terrorism.”
Sudan’s government said it “entered into this settlement out of concern to settle the historical allegations of terrorism left by the former regime, and only for the purpose of satisfying the conditions set by the U.S. administration to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in order to normalize relations with the United States and the rest of the world.”
The attorneys for the USS Cole victims and family members noted their legal team, which had been led by Andrew Hall until he died last year, had pursued this litigation for a decade and a half.
“After two decades, the victims of the USS Cole bombing and their families finally have closure,” the legal team’s statement to the Washington Examiner said. “Sudan’s significant financial payment will not make their grief go away, but it’s the only means available to compensate the victims and their loss stemming from the brutal attack on the USS Cole.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged that “we’ve been looking at whether to lift the designation of the state sponsor of terror on Sudan for quite some time” when asked by reporters about it on Thursday.
“One of the elements of that is there are a series of claims for victims of the Cole,” Pompeo explained. “We’re trying — we’re doing our best to address those as part of this.”
“I was actually with the Sudanese yesterday … and the Sudanese reminded me that they would love to get off that list,” Pompeo added. “We always measure twice and cut once before we remove someone from a list like that.”
The State Department first designated Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 for supporting international groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
The State Department noted recently that Sudan “asserts that it no longer supports them or any terrorist organization” and “has taken some steps to work with the United States on counterterrorism.”
Earlier this week, Sudan indicated its willingness to turn over former President Omar al Bashir to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face charges of war crimes and genocide stemming from the civil war in Darfur.
In 2010, 15 sailors injured in the USS Cole bombing, along with a number of their spouses, sued Sudan’s government in Washington, D.C., under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, alleging Sudan provided material support in the al Qaeda attack. After an evidentiary hearing, D.C.’s District Court entered a $314 million default judgment against Sudan in 2012.
In early 2019, the Supreme Court overturned lower court decisions, concluding Sudan hadn’t been properly served with the lawsuit since the notice was sent to the Sudanese Embassy in D.C. instead of to Sudan’s Foreign Minister in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion in the 8-1 decision, saying notice shouldn’t have been sent to “a far flung outpost that the minister may at most occasionally visit.”
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying that “given the unique role that embassies play in facilitating communications between states, a foreign state’s embassy in Washington, D.C., is … a place where a U.S. litigant can serve the state’s foreign minister.”
Courts have ruled that Sudan was complicit in the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed hundreds, including 12 Americans. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to take up Sudan’s appeal of the $3.8 billion default judgment against it for those attacks, and Sudan has not yet reached a settlement with the victims in those cases.
