With Cole attack deal, Sudan on track to exit terror sponsor list

CAIRO — Sudan’s transitional government said Thursday that it has reached a settlement with families of the victims of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, a key step in having the U.S. remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism so it can rejoin the international community after years of exclusion.

Copies of the agreement obtained by The Associated Press show that $70 million will be split among families of the 17 people who were killed in the attack, as well as 15 of the sailors who were injured and two of their spouses. Sudan makes no admission of wrongdoing.

Sudan’s Justice Ministry said the agreement was signed with the victims’ families on Feb. 7.

The announcement was the latest in a series of efforts by the interim government to close the book on former President Omar al-bashir, whose three decades of iron-fisted rule was brought to an end in popular protests last year.

Al-bashir’s Islamist government promoted policies that ensured Sudan remained a pariah to much of the world. The International Criminal

Court accused him of genocide for his leadership of a scorched-earth campaign in southern Darfur in response to a rebel insurgency there. Up to 300,000 people were killed.

But in recent weeks the transitional government has sought to erase remnants of al-bashir’s rule so it can heal the country’s battered economy. On Tuesday, it said it would hand him and other Sudanese officials over to the court in The Hague to be tried for war crimes.

Settling the USS Cole case would be another big move in Sudan’s rehabilitation.

On Oct. 12, 2000, two suicide bombers in a boat detonated their explosives alongside the U.S. Navy destroyer as it was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden.

Sudan was accused of providing support to al-qaida, which claimed responsibility for the attack. Under al-bashir, the country was designated by Washington as a “state sponsor of terror” for hosting the group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, in the early years of his militant movement.

Faisal Saleh, Sudan’s information minister and interim government spokesman, said Justice Minister Nasr-eddin Abdul-bari had traveled to Washington to sign the deal.