Twenty years after the bombing, Anne Dammarell encouraged the family of Stevens, representing one of eighty plaintiffs of the dead and injured, to join a civil suit in U.S. Federal District Court of Washington, DC against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).  The hearing of this case, Dammarell v. the Islamic Republic of Iran, began on September 8, 2003 and cited evidence that agents of the Iranian government had supported, funded, and planned the embassy attack. Among those who testified were Stevens's identical twin sister, Jo Ann Stevens, and her brothers Hazen H. Stevens and Scott C. Stevens. Lawyers for the plaintiffs connected the embassy bombing attack to other events in which they claimed Iranian government complicity: the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps in Lebanon in October 1983; the assassination of Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, in 1984; the bombing of the U.S. Embassy Annex in East Beirut, Lebanon, in September 1984; and the kidnapping between 1982 and 1991 of 50 hostages who included American, British, French, and German nationals.