FEDERAL COURTS

Weston family faces frustration of court fight after grief of terror bombing

 

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The Wultz family posts updates about its lawsuit against the Bank of China at danielwultz.com, on Twitter and on Facebook. It also maintains a charitable foundation in his memory at dcwfoundation.org.


ebenn@MiamiHerald.com

In the spring of 2006, Weston teenager Daniel Cantor Wultz had the brightest of futures. A star sophomore at Plantation’s David Posnack Hebrew Day School, Daniel, 16, talked about someday becoming a rabbi.

His deepening interest in Judaism is part of what took him on a family vacation to Israel that Passover, to visit relatives and learn about his roots. When he and his dad had a hankering for shawarma pita sandwiches, they took a taxi to the popular Rosh Ha’ir stand near the old Tel Aviv bus station.

Just at they visited the stand, a bomber blew himself up, sending shrapnel flying around Rosh Ha’ir. Eleven people would die, including Daniel, and 70 others would be injured, including his father, Yekutiel “Tuly” Wultz.

After Tuly Wultz and his wife, Sheryl, buried their son, they vowed to do whatever it took to protect another Daniel from dying at the hands of a terrorist. And thus began an odyssey that has layered frustration on top of heartbreak.

For the Wultzes, preventing the next attack meant going after the parties they believe are responsible for killing Daniel: Syria and Iran, which aided the Islamic Jihad group that carried out the attack; and Bank of China, which the Wultzes claim acted as a conduit for the money used to fund the bombing.

They won their case against Syria and Iran. A U.S. District Court judge in Washington last year ordered a $323 million judgment against the governments of those countries to the Wultz family. The ruling came down six years to the day after Daniel’s death; the Wultzes have yet to receive a penny.

Their federal case against the Bank of China, however, has run into a recent roadblock and landed the Wultzes at the center of an international legal and political clash between Israel, China and the United States.

The hiccup involves the testimony of a key witness, former Israeli security official Uzi Shaya. He was set to testify on behalf of the Wultzes that he was present for a 2005 meeting where Israel warned the Chinese government about Bank of China accounts with possible ties to terrorist groups.

Now, the Wultzes and their attorney say Israel’s government, which pushed the family to file the suit in 2008, is trying to block Shaya from testifying in order to bolster Israeli relations with China.

“We’re going to win this case, with or without Israel’s help,” Tuly Wultz said last week.

Israel initially prompted the Wultzes to pursue the Bank of China lawsuit because, as the only U.S. citizens who lost a family member in the April 17, 2006, bombing outside the Tel Aviv restaurant, they could file the case in America, with the country’s substantial antiterrorism laws.

“The Wultzes did not get into this on their own,” said the family’s attorney, Lee Wolosky, who previously helped lead U.S. counterterrorism efforts under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “After they lost their son, they were contacted by the Israeli government, which encouraged them to bring this lawsuit. It’s not like they were just sitting in Weston and all of a sudden they received specific Bank of China account numbers that showed money going to terrorists. They had substantial help from the Israeli government.”

Israel did an about-face, Wolosky said, when the Chinese threatened to cancel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit to China in May. Since then, the question of whether Israel would allow Shaya to testify has been up in the air.

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