SUDAN NEWS ALERT: Multiple sources – Sudan will pay $30 million to families of USS Cole attack victims

13/2/2020: Multiple sources – Sudan will pay $30 million to families of USS Cole attack victims

• BBC

• CNN, by Nima Elbagir, Yassir Abdallah and Nada AlTaher

• Bloomberg, by Mohammed Alamin

• Times, by Jane Flanagan

• AP, by Noha Elhennawy

• Reuters

 Sudan will pay a $30 million settlement to the families of 17 US Navy sailors killed in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in a bid to get itself removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism (SST).

 Sudan's government "explicitly denies" its involvement in the attack and says the pay-out is intended to "settle the historical allegations of terrorism left by [Omar al-Bashir’s] regime."

 Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok said the agreement was made "to meet the conditions set by the US administration to remove Sudan from the [SST list] to normalise relations with the US and the rest of the world.”

 Former US State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin told AP that the SST designation is a “diplomatic nuclear bomb,” given that the “politics of getting off the list are always incredibly complicated and draw in issues that don’t directly have anything to do with terrorism.”