U.S. to Pay More Than $1 Million to Family of Italian Killed in Drone Strike

The Obama administration has settled on a landmark deal to pay more than $1 million to an Italian aid worker’s family, after he was killed in Pakistan in a drone strike by the U.S. last year. Giovanni Lo Porto, 37, and Warren Weinstein, 73, were killed in the secret strike while they were being held hostage by al Qaeda. President Obama admitted in 2015 that Lo Porto and Weinstein, an American, were accidentally killed in the mission. The deal, between Lo Porto’s family and the U.S. government, was signed on July 8 by Garrett Stephen Wayne, financial management center director of the U.S. embassy in Rome. Documents obtained by The Guardian reportedly say the payment is “a donation in the memory of Giovanni Lo Porto” and that it “does not imply the consent by the United States of America to the exercise of the jurisdiction of the Italian courts in disputes, if any, directly or indirectly connected with this instrument. Nothing in this instrument implies a waiver to sovereign or personal immunity.”