Iranian files suit to free assets frozen in U.S.

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) -- An Iranian citizen has filed a lawsuit in a local court for the release of billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen in the United States, newspapers said on Tuesday.

The citizen, who was not named, filed the suit in his hometown of Khorramabad in western Iran for what he said was money belonging to the public, the daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami said. Other newspapers carried similar reports.

"This money requisitioned by the United States is public money belonging to the nation, everybody has a duty to see that it is returned," Jomhuri-ye Eslami quoted him as saying.

Washington confiscated all Iranian state assets in the U.S. after militant students took 52 U.S. nationals hostage in the embassy compound in downtown Tehran just months after the 1979 Islamic revolution deposed the Western-backed Shah.

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The hostage crisis lasted for 444 days and the two countries' diplomatic ties have been cut ever since.

The frozen Iranian assets in the United States were estimated to be worth up to $14 billion at the time.

The lawsuit comes only days after parliament passed a bill allowing Iranians to file for damages against the U.S. government in local courts in a tit-for-tat measure after Washington agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to victims of what it calls Iranian "state-sponsored terrorism."

Iran's judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi thanked parliament for unanimously passing the bill.

"After the very good steps taken by parliament, judicial officials met with representatives of the foreign ministry and it was decided that a special branch of the public courts in Tehran would deal with all compensation cases," a judiciary official was quoted by newspapers as saying.

U.S. courts had earlier ordered Iran to pay $341 million to former Beirut hostage Terry Anderson, $325 million to families of two U.S. students killed in a 1996 Israeli bus bombing and $247 million to relatives of another student killed by a 1995 bomb there.

The amounts included damages designed to punish Iran for what the U.S. courts said was its role in the attacks.

Following Tehran's denial of any involvement in the killings and its flat refusal to pay any compensation, the U.S. government agreed to pay victims itself in the expectation that it will one day get the money back from Iran.

Iran also says there have been many Iranian victims of U.S. aggression, from the Washington-backed coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 to the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the U.S. navy in 1988, killing 290 people.

The new law makes it possible for Iranians to sue for emotional damage and eased the way for cases to come to court, waiving the requirement that plaintiffs pay court fees in advance.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA
Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting
Democracy Network of Iran
Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran
Amnesty International 1999 Report for Iran
Human Rights Watch 1999 Report for Iran

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