A curious case of Americans versus Iran has the Tehran government asking for Washington to intervene and the University of Chicago defending the Islamic regime in court.
At issue is an extremely valuable collection of ancient Persian cuneiform tablets that victims of a terror bombing want to seize and auction as compensation.
The clay tablets have been kept in the Chicago university's museum since the 1930s.
But lawyers for Americans wounded in a 1997 bombing in Jerusalem won a court ruling last month that takes them a step closer to seizing the collection for want of other accessible Iranian assets in the US.
The university said it planned to appeal the ruling.
"The Oriental Institute will do everything in its power to protect cultural patrimony and the character of the tablets as an irreplaceable scholarly data set," the university's Oriental Institute director Gil Stein said in a letter to Iranian cultural authorities.
"The protection of cultural patrimony and of scholarly research are fundamental matters of principle for us, as they should be for every civilized person and nation," Stein wrote.
The plaintiffs argue that Iran has to compensate them as an Iranian-supported group, Hamas -- now the government in the Palestinian territories -- claimed responsibility for the bombing in the popular Ben Yehuda mall, which killed five people and wounded 192 others.
A US judge has already ordered that Iran should pay the victims US$423.5 million and last month another judge ruled against the University of Chicago, which is fighting to retain the tablets inscribed in cuneiform.
"We expect the US government to show a swift and serious reaction to prevent implementation of the verdict," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said on Sunday.
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