Sudan settles $70 million USS Cole suit

The transitional government of Sudan has paid-out a settlement of $70 million to the families of the victims of the 2000 USS Cole* bombing in Yemen in an effort to persuade the USA to remove Sudan from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, considered essential to the country’s economic recovery.

In a statement on Sunday, the Ministry of Finance confirmed that they finalised the payment to settle the case.

On February 13, Sudan’s Ministry of Justice confirmed that a settlement agreement was signed on February 7.

“The government of Sudan wishes to indicate that the settlement agreement explicitly affirmed that the government is not responsible for this incident or any other terrorist incidents or acts, and that 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 to meet the conditions set by the US administration to delete Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in order to normalise relations with the USA and the rest of the world.”

The matter was high on the agenda during the February meeting between Sudan’s Prime Minister, Abdullah Hamdok and US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, on the side lines of the Munich Security Conference.

At that meeting, Hamdok expressed hope that the progress made in the settlement of the USS Cole* question would help accelerate the process of removing the name of Sudan from the US list of countries sponsors of international terrorism.

The US Secretary of State confirmed that the settlement of the USS Cole issue was an important step in progress in the relations between Sudan and the USA.

* USS COLE: The October 12, 2000 attack killed 17 sailors and wounded more than three dozen others when two men in a small boat detonated explosives alongside the Navy guided-missile destroyer as it was refuelling in the southern Yemeni port of Aden, blasting a gaping hole in its hull. The vessel was repaired and later returned to full active duty.

In a ruling in March 2019, the US Supreme Court prevented US sailors injured in the deadly Al Qaeda bombing in 2000 of the US Navy destroyer USS Cole from collecting $314.7 million in damages from the government of Sudan for its alleged role in the attack.

A majority of eight judges to one overturned a lower court’s ruling that had allowed the US servicemen to collect the damages from certain banks that held frozen Sudanese assets. However the new judgment rests more on a legal technicality than exonerating Sudan. In the ruling, the justices agreed with Sudan that the lawsuit had not been properly initiated in violation of US law, because the claims were delivered in 2010 to the Sudanese Embassy in Washington rather than to its Minister of Foreign Affairs in Khartoum.

15 of the injured sailors and three of their spouses sued Sudan’s government in 2010 in Washington. At issue was whether mailing the lawsuit to Sudan’s embassy violated the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a US law governing when foreign governments may be sued in American courts.

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