A U.S. judge has ordered Iran to pay $1.45 billion to the family of a former FBI agent believed to have been kidnapped by the Islamic Republic while on an unauthorized CIA mission to an Iranian island in 2007.
The judgment this month comes after Robert Levinson's family and the U.S. government now believe he died in the Iranian government's custody, something long denied by Tehran, though officials over time have offered contradictory accounts about what happened to him on Kish Island.
In a ruling dated Thursday, the U.S. District Court in Washington found Iran owed Levinson's family $1.35 billion in punitive damages and $107 million in compensatory damages for his kidnapping. The court cited the case of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died in 2017 shortly after being freed from captivity in North Korea, in deciding to award the massive amount of punitive damages to Levinson's family.