Jury hears arguments in terror finance trial

Victims of suicide bombings in Israel assert executives at Jordan-based bank knowingly helped Hamas fund operations

Executives at Jordan-based Arab Bank should not be held responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Israel in the early 2000s that left several Americans dead, a lawyer said Thursday in closing arguments at a US civil trial.

“There’s not one word of testimony in this case that could lead you to conclude that any one of those people deliberately supported terrorism — not a word,” attorney Shand Stephens told jurors in federal court in Brooklyn.

In more than a month of testimony, the jury had heard Arab Bank Chairman Sabih Al-Masri and other executives take the witness stand to deny allegations in a 2004 lawsuit filed by the American victims that the bank knowingly helped Hamas fund a “death and dismemberment benefit plan” for martyrs from the West Bank and Gaza. The defense portrayed Al-Masri as a trusted banker whose own family had been victimized by terrorism and who opened branches in the Palestinian territories to help with rebuilding and humanitarian efforts — not to back extremists.

Stephens had Al-Masri, who was at the defense table on Thursday, stand up and asked, “Was that somebody who supported terrorism? … Was it him?”

The defense also argued that people the plaintiffs identified as Hamas operatives who did business with the bank weren’t on a terrorist watch lists compiled by authorities in the United States and other Western nations. The plaintiffs “are asking you to make your own list” based on the word of their experts, Stephens told the jury.

The civil case is the first time a bank has faced a trial under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows victims of US-designated foreign terrorist organizations to seek compensation. The US State Department designated Hamas a terrorist group in 1997.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs were to give their closing arguments later Thursday.