CHICAGO (AP) — Twelve years after terrorists’ gunfire killed 17-year-old American David

CHICAGO (AP) — Twelve years after terrorists’ gunfire killed 17-year-old American David Boim at a bus stop in a West Bank town near Jerusalem, U.S. courts are still trying to settle whether anyone must pay millions of dollars in damages.

A lower court ordered several U.S.-based Islamic groups to pay $156 million to Boim’s family — who claimed money that several U.S.-based Islamic groups gave to Palestinian charities ultimately helped fund terrorism. It was the first lawsuit filed under a 1991 law allowing American victims of international terrorism to recover triple damages.

Last December, a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out that lower court’s order.

But now the same appeals court is second-guessing itself and revisiting the emotionally charged case. During an extraordinary “en banc” hearing last week, all 10 of the 7th Circuit’s actively sitting judges gave the bitterly contested case a fresh airing.

“It’s been an ordeal,” says Matthew J. Piers, an attorney for Muhammad Salah, the lone individual sued for damages by Joyce and Stanley Boim.

The Boims also are suing the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development; the American Muslim Society, also known as the Islamic Association for Palestine; and the Quranic Literacy Institute, a group based in south suburban Bridgeview that translates Islamic texts.

The Boims say some of the money that Salah and the organizations gave to Palestinian charities on the West Bank bankrolled terrorism and thus ultimately paid for their son’s murder — even if it didn’t buy the specific gun and bullets.

Salah, 54, who is finishing a 22-month federal prison sentence for lying on documents in the Boim case, once was employed by the Quranic institute. He is a U.S. citizen who grew up in a West Bank refugee camp, and spent 41‚Ñ2 years in Israeli prisons in the 1990s after police found $90,000 in cash allegedly destined for Hamas in his East Jerusalem hotel room.

Piers told the 7th Circuit judges last week that any money Salah gave to the terrorist group was delivered so long before David Boim was killed that there could be no relationship.

Holy Land Foundation attorney John W. Boyd says that group even had a rule: none of its humanitarian money was to go to Hamas, which runs schools and clinics in addition to engaging in armed violence.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys in 2004 found the foundation, the American Muslim Society and Salah liable. A jury added Quranic Literacy Institute to the list and ordered all of the defendants to pay a total of $52 million in damages. Keys tripled the amount to $156 million.

However, a three-judge 7th Circuit panel threw out the $156 million order, ruling that the Boims had failed to show a tight enough link between the charitable contributions and the death of their son.