Arab Bank Is Sued in Attacks

Lawyers for victims of attacks by Palestinian militant groups filed suit Tuesday against a prominent Middle Eastern bank, saying it helped funnel money to Palestinian suicide bombers and should be forced to pay damages.

The suit against Arab Bank was filed in federal district court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on behalf of nearly 700 victims of attacks in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their relatives. The plaintiffs are from Israel, the U.S. and 10 other countries.

“We are striking back nonviolently with the most powerful weapon we have -- the U.S. courts,” said plaintiff Iris Almog Schwartz, an Israeli whose parents, brother and two nephews were killed in an October 2003 suicide bombing at a restaurant in Haifa, Israel. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

The 149-page lawsuit contends that the Jordan-based Arab Bank knew or should have known that its accounts were being used by well-known Palestinian militant organizations to pay the families of suicide bombers who blew up civilian and military targets in Israel and the occupied territories.

Two narrower lawsuits have been lodged against Arab Bank over its alleged role in terrorist attacks. Tuesday’s action drew attention because it was filed by attorney Ronald L. Motley, whose Charleston, S.C.-based law firm has spearheaded a controversial lawsuit on behalf of victims and survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Lawyers in that case have used legal tools to obtain extensive new information about the Sept. 11 attacks. The suit seeks billions of dollars in damages from prominent Saudi royal family members, businessmen and others who they say helped finance and otherwise facilitate the Al Qaeda attacks that killed almost 3,000 people at the Pentagon and in New York.

The Sept. 11 case has garnered both praise and criticism for disclosing information about the attacks that the U.S. government has sought to keep classified. Motley said he would use the same multinational research team of investigative, counterterrorism and intelligence experts in the Arab Bank case.

The new complaint accuses Arab Bank of complicity in a years-long effort by Palestinian militant groups “to eradicate the Israeli presence from the Middle East landscape,” in part by paying families of suicide bombers.

Arab Bank branches, including one on Madison Avenue in New York, also participated in a “massive, government-supported fundraising campaign in Saudi Arabia that has funneled more than $4 billion from public and private Saudi sources to Palestinian terrorist groups and the families of suicide bombers,” the complaint alleges.

The bank provided the financial resources that allowed Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Martyr Yasser Arafat Brigade (formerly known as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine “to flourish and to engage in a campaign of terror, genocide and crimes against humanity,” the suit says. The U.S. has designated the four groups as terrorist organizations.

A spokesman for Arab Bank, the largest and oldest private-sector banking network in the Middle East, denied the allegations.

“Arab Bank asserts unequivocally, and above all else, that it deplores and condemns terrorism in all its forms, and is saddened by the consequences of it,” said Kevin Walsh, a lawyer with Winston & Strawn of Chicago. “The accusations being brought against the bank, as we understand them, are entirely false.”

The suit is based on the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which grants non-U.S. citizens access to the courts for violations of “the law of nations,” such as genocide and terrorism, and the Antiterrorism Act of 1990, which gives U.S. citizens or relatives injured or killed in terrorist attacks the right to seek justice from those who aided the attacks.