AFP: The US Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear the case of the brother of a murdered Iranian dissident who is seeking to collect 2.8 million dollars in terrorism damages.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear the case of the brother of a murdered Iranian dissident who is seeking to collect 2.8 million dollars in terrorism damages.
In October 1990, Cyrus Elahi, a US citizen of Iranian origin, was murdered in Paris in an act attributed to the Iranian secret service.
Ten years later, a US court ordered the Iranian government to pay 311 million dollars in damages to the brother of the victim, Dariush Elahi.
In an attempt to receive some of that sum, Elahi involved himself in another case, in which a US military contractor was ordered to pay 2.8 million dollars to Tehran because it did not honor a contract signed before the 1979 revolution.
Elahi is demanding that the amount due the Iranian government be paid directly to his family.
But as that case was underway, Elahi received 2.3 million dollars from the US government, from a fund established in 2000 to compensate victims of Iranian terrorism in cases where Tehran was not paying sums awarded in courts.
In May 2007, a US federal appeals court — rejecting arguments from both the Iranian government and the US government — said Elahi's 2.3-million-dollar award from the US government did not make him ineligible to pursue the 2.8 million dollars linked to the military contract.
The US high court on Monday said it would consider the Iranian government's appeal of the case, with a hearing expected at the end of the year and a ruling sometime in 2009.
