Racing against a midnight deadline, Republican and Democratic negotiators agreed on a $1.1 trillion spending bill Tuesday night. The bill includes provisions to compensate victims of terrorist attacks, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
“This bill is an answered prayer and sends a clear message to the world that America will stand by those who stand by it,” George Mimba, who survived the 1998 bombing and still works at the Nairobi embassy, said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress. “We are so grateful to Congress and proud and affirmed in our service to America.”
Victims of the Nairobi attack appealed to Obama for compensation during his visit to Kenya in July. The East African Embassy bombings were among the deadliest on U.S. soil since since embassies are technically under the jurisdiction of the state they represent. More than 200 people, including 13 Americans, were killed after al Qaeda bombed the embassy in Nairobi, with 11 killed in the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Tanzania. None of them have received compensation aside from immediate medical costs and material losses.
In addition creating a framework for victims of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil or against Americans, including the Iran hostage crises and the USS Cole bombing in 2000, the bill also provides an extension of the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.
While the provision does not list specific attacks, it establishes a process through which victims and their families can be awarded damages for injuries or deaths caused by international terrorist attacks or from being held hostage. For the first time, this bill makes clear that money seized, forfeited, or paid to the United States from those violating the Trading with the Enemy Act will go into a pool to compensate victims of terrorism.
The initial sum will come, in part, from the $9 billion forfeiture from BNP Paribas, a French bank that violated sanctions by laundering money through three countries deemed to be state sponsors of terrorism. So far, no portion of that record-breaking settlement has been paid to the victims of terrorist attacks.
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“The Department of Justice would not have been able to take the bank to court if it was not for the testimony of the victims,” Doreen Oport, an Embassy employee who suffered back injuries in the Nairobi bombing, told ThinkProgress in June.
Now she and other victims of the 1998 East African Embassy bombings whose testimony helped indict BNP last year will be able to make a case for a portion of the bank’s forfeiture.