Several victims of the 1998 US embassy bombings came to a New York courtroom on Friday with high hopes of finally gaining compensation as a result of a multibillion-dollar legal settlement ordered last year.
But the Kenyans and Tanzanians who were working at the East African embassies at the time of the attack left the federal courthouse bitterly disappointed.
They had anticipated the US government would agree to give them and hundreds of other embassy employees and family members a share of the nearly $9 billion that a Paris-based bank had forfeited for violating sanctions Washington had imposed on Sudan, Iran and Cuba.
An assistant US prosecutor had said in court last year that some of the money forfeited by BNP Paribas, France’s biggest bank, could go to those harmed by terrorist attacks linked to the three countries.
Attorneys for more than 600 US embassy employees and their families affected by the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam subsequently filed a petition for a share of those funds.
US government lawyers announced in court on Friday, however, that compensation claims could be filed, online, only by those harmed in the period from 2004 to 2012. BNP had previously admitted to violating US sanctions during those years.
“Total disappointment” was the reaction expressed by Marina Kirima in an interview with the Associated Press.
“It’s like starting all over again,” said Ms Kirima, who was working at the embassy in Nairobi when the bomb exploded 17 years ago.
James Ndeda, a systems specialist employed at the US embassy at the time of the attack, offered a similar response in his comments to the AP, a US-based international news agency.
Referring to the other East Africans attending the proceedings in New York on Friday, Mr Ndeda told the AP: “As you look at these faces, they’re all disappointed. This process has taken too long.”
BASE FOR PLANNING
The Kenyans and Tanzanians who worked at the embassies in 1998 must now look to US Attorney-General Loretta Lynch to rule in their favour.
Following the US government’s decision to limit claims to a period long after the Nairobi and Dar attacks, compensation to this group of earlier victims can reportedly be made solely at Ms Lynch’s discretion.
Attorneys for the East African embassy workers point to BNP’s acknowledgment that by 1997 — the year the US imposed sanctions on Sudan — it had become the dominant European bank operating in Sudan. And other US court cases related to the Nairobi and Dar attacks have established that Sudan was used as a base for planning the embassy bombings the following year.
But BNP has admitted in court to carrying out transactions on behalf of sanctions-affected banks in Sudan only from 2006 to 2007.
A key question to be addressed, according to the Bloomberg news agency, is whether wire transfers facilitated by BNP beginning in 1997 were related to preparations for the embassy attacks.
The petition filed last year by the embassy victims’ attorneys said circumstantial evidence suggests that BNP may have been used as a conduit for money that helped finance the attacks, the Bloomberg report added.
-nation.co.ke
