Osama Will Pay. This Time In Cash

By Sora Song

At least 12 families who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attacks plan to sue Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Such efforts used to be considered almost comically futile, but with the passage in 2000 of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act, Congress has enabled terrorism victims to sue successfully some foreign governments. How do you get them to pay up? From assets frozen in the U.S.

In the past year alone, more than $410 million was paid out from frozen funds of Cuba and Iran. Relatives of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996 won $97 million, and the family of Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old New Jersey student killed in 1995 in a Hizballah attack in the Gaza Strip, got $22 million.

The U.S. has found and frozen about $300 million in Osama bin Laden's and the Taliban's money, and while some of it could revert to a future Afghan government, this may not deter potential plaintiffs--including victims of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. "For families of victims, suing bin Laden and the Taliban is a way of fighting back," says Pamela Falk, a law professor at the City University of New York. If Congress lists Afghanistan as a terrorist state, she says, "the prospects have never looked better."

--Reported by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas

With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas