E-Mail This Article to a Friend STRANGE JUSTICE Terror victims look for payment — in Boston’s museums BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

This fragment, depicting Persia’s annual "March of Nations" ritual, can be seen in the Ancient Near East Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston — for now. The MFA may lose it, and other Persian antiquities, in a strange court case filed last month in Boston’s federal District Court. The suit also threatens works in five Harvard University museums. Boston-area art lovers, historians, and academics could, in one swoop, lose a huge treasure of Middle Eastern antiquity.

The lawsuit stems from a 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem, which killed five and wounded almost 200. Five American citizens injured in the attack — most of them teenagers — took advantage of anti-terror legislation signed by Bill Clinton to sue the Islamic Republic of Iran for damages. Iran, the argument goes, supported and assisted Hamas, which carried out the attack.

They won. In September 2003, a federal court in Washington, DC, awarded them a combined judgment of $259 million. Unsurprisingly, however, Iran has not cut the checks. The families have tried to get at Iranian assets frozen by the US government, but have been rebuffed.

So they are now trying a new approach: laying claim to antiquities excavated from Iran in the 1930s, and now sitting in American museum collections. An MFA spokesperson confirms that the institution has been served papers in the case.

"It’s ludicrous," says Jonathan Bloom, Calderwood Chair in Fine Arts at Boston College, and an expert on Islamic art. "These things are not even owned by the Iranian government. It’s like saying the Iranian carpets in everyone’s houses are now mine."

But if the bombing victims can show that the pieces should, by rights, never have been taken from Iran, then they can make a strong case for taking the art as payment — or, at least, a small fraction of payment. "You’d have to find an awful lot of antiquities to come up with $250 million worth," Bloom says. "It’s not the Mona Lisa. It’s mostly old pots that might be worth $5000 to $10,000."