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| Texas Court: Islamic Terror Victims Can Access Funds From Front Charities |
| 2011-05-12 |
| Its another courtroom victory for the terror victims - this one against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). The District Court in Dallas has just handed down a historic court decision with truly far-reaching implications. The Court in Texas has found that the terror victim's right to collect on their judgments against the terrorist groups, their front-charity organizations and the outlaw regimes overrides the government's right to confiscate the terrorists' assets. On September 4, 1997 three Hamas suicide bombers detonated themselves on the crowded Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem. The terror attack left 5 dead and 181 wounded. One of the murdered and many of those who had been seriously injured were U.S.citizens unlucky enough to be on Ben Yehuda Street when Hamas targeted this popular tourist locale. Along with American attorney David Strachman, we filed a lawsuit in 2002 against both the government of Iran and against Hamas in the federal court in Washington, DC. Two years later, after Hamas refused to defend itself in the civil action, a judgment was entered on behalf of the families in the amount of $214.5 million. This same year, the DOJ filed an indictment against a Texas based Palestinian charity, the now infamous HLF. The U.S. alleged that the HLF was the financial arm of Hamas in America. In addition to charging its leaders with material support for terrorism and money laundering, all of the HLF's bank accounts were frozen by the DOJ. We discovered that the HLF had bank accounts in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois, and Washington and immediately filed execution proceedings in all these places to satisfy, in part, the victim's judgment against Hamas. Next the DOJ filed a restraining order to block the victim's families from collecting the funds. They argued that once the DOJ had filed its indictment against the Palestinian charity, the HLF's assets had been forfeited to the government under the Criminal Forfeiture Statute and the families were out of luck. |
| Posted by:Cheater Thath2162 |