Career
In the 1990s Darshan-Leitner helped litigate a case on behalf of victims of the Achille Lauro hijacking of 1985. During work on this case, she appeared before the Israeli Supreme Court in an attempt to prevent one of the hijackers, Muhammed Abbas from being allowed to travel to Israel. On April 15, 2003, Abbas was captured by American forces in Iraq while attempting to flee from Baghdad to Syria. Italy subsequently requested his extradition. The Pentagon reported on March 9, 2004 that Zaidan had died the previous day, of natural causes, while in U.S. custody.
In 2003, Darshan-Leitner founded Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center in Tel Aviv. Shurat HaDin is an Israeli based civil rights center which focuses on bringing lawsuits and legal actions on behalf of the victims of terrorism. She has said she was influenced by the activities of the Southern Poverty Law Center which had bankrupted several branches of the KKK and other neo-Nazi groups through civil litigation. In founding Shurat HaDin, she noted her goal was to "go after terrorists in the same way that they (the SPLC) were going after racists."
Darshan-Leitner is said to have succeeded in receiving more than $1 billion in judgments, freezing over $600 million in terror assets and securing over $120 million in actual disbursements to the victims and their families. She represents hundreds of terror victims in cases brought against the Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the PLO, among others. She successfully represented Puerto Rican family victims of the 1972 Lod terrorist attack in a lawsuit against North Korea. In 2010, a US federal court on the island ruled in their favor, ordering the North Korean government to compensate the victims for the sum of $378 million.
Read more about this topic: Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
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