The Justice Department has appointed Kenneth R. Feinberg, the lawyer who administered compensation for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, as special master to oversee a new fund to compensate victims of state-sponsored terrorism.

The fund, created by Congress late last year, will provide compensation to victims of attacks like the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the bombings of the American Embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. It is also intended to compensate the Americans taken hostage at the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

The Justice Department on Tuesday informed lawyers representing some victims of these attacks that Mr. Feinberg, who also handled claims related to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, had been selected as special master. And it noted the importance of the post, which carries “unreviewable authority to issue awards from the fund.”

The fund presents some unusual complications because it covers victims who in some cases have already been designated to receive compensation in various federal court rulings, as well as the Tehran Embassy hostages, who were long barred from seeking court-ordered damages from Iran because of the terms of the treaty that freed them in 1981.