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Israelis Sue Chinese Bank for Aiding Hamas
(UPI) The families of terror victims in Israel have filed a $1 billion lawsuit in New York against the Bank of China for aiding Hamas. The Shurat Ha Din-Israel Law Center filed the suit on behalf of five families of students who died in an attack on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem on March 6, 2008, in which eight students died. "We were able to make use of laws allowing non-Americans to also sue in U.S. courts in the case of terrorism," center director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said. The suit asserts that in 2003 the Bank of China executed dozens of wire transfers totaling millions of dollars to Hamas initiated by the terror group's leadership in Syria and Iran. The transfers were processed by Bank of China branches in the U.S., sent to an account in China operated by a senior militant, and then transferred to Hamas in Gaza. In 2005, Israeli counterterrorism officials met with Chinese officials and demanded they stop the wire transfers. "Despite these warnings, the state-owned bank, with Beijing's approval, continued to wire funds for terrorism, all while declaring they did not consider Hamas a terrorist group." Hamas was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997 and as "specially designated global terrorists" in 2001, making the group subject to strict economic sanctions.