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Iran’s outbreak is the worst outbreak in the Middle East, although doctors in Turkey have raised big doubts about their country’s official reporting of infections and deaths in relation to the virus.
The daily coronavirus death toll in Iran has been running at more than 200 cases lately.
2.2 Tehran fending off US attempt to seize control of $1.7bn Iranian assets to compensate terror victims
Iran has dismissed a lawsuit filed in the US to force Luxembourg to put Iranian accounts with $1.7bn of assets under US control, Mehr News reported on August 30, citing the Central Bank of Iran (CBI).
The US made the move to gain funds to pay back alleged “victims of terrorism” that it claims was conducted by or was tacitly supported by Iran. The victims includesomevictimsoftheS eptember11attacks.Thevaguewordingofthe filed charges allows US lawyers to search for Iranian assets around the world, with financial centres like Luxembourg thus becoming targets.
"The move by the US is doomed to fail like similar American legal process attempts that have ended in Iran’s favour in recent years," the CBI said in a statement.
Amir Hossein Tayyebi Fard, a CBI deputy governor, said: “After repeated legal defeats in Luxembourg, the US plaintiffs are seeking legal action in US courts against Clearstream. Serious legal action is also under way to counter these measures.”
The CBI’s comments followed a statement froof Deutsche Borse. It said that it would take steps to defeat the suit filed in a New York court seeking to require Clearstream to surrender assets.
The German company said that it considered the claims as unfounded and would fight any extradition of funds.
A Luxembourg appeals court on April 13 said it had blocked a longstanding request from the US to transfer funds.
The court in Luxembourg also said that the US seizure demand was “inadmissible” since the type of account concerned was “unseizable” according to national law.
The funds were part of legal transactions conducted by Iran through the European tax haven prior to 2017 but—although no link between Iran and the September 11 attacks has even been proven and Al Qaeda is a sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic—they were frozen at the request of the US Trump administration in relation to a New York court ruling for families of 9/11 victims. Families of victims of the September 11 attacks persuaded a federal judge in New York in March 2017 to find that Iran had aided the Twin Towers attacks by providing assistance to al-Qaeda via Hezbollah. In 2012, he ordered Iran to pay the victims $2bn in damages and $5bn in punitive damages.
7 IRAN Country Report September 2020 www.intellinews.com
