Argentina Reversing Progress on Probe Of Big Terror Bombings
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/argentina-reversing-progress-on-probe-of-big/91029/
Justice? Not as far Argentina’s new government is concerned. Buenos Aires is eager to walk back any progress made in investigations into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires — the worst terror act in the country’s history — or the suspicious death of the man who was set to break the case open.
Previous probes yielded ample evidence that Iran was behind the attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, which killed 85 people, as well as an earlier terrorist act, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, when 29 civilians perished. The new Argentinian government would rather ignore it all.
And no wonder. Since December, Kristina Kirchner is Argentina’s vice president, a demotion for the woman who was president between 2007 and 2015. At that time, after the Interpol already issued red notices for the arrests of Iranian officials and Hezbollah operatives, Mrs. Kirchner was set to form a joint investigative commission with Tehran.
Before he died, Kirchner’s foreign minister, Hector Timerman, who sealed struck in 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding with Tehran, scoffed once when I told him the proposed joint investigation sounded as credible as O.J. Simpson’s vow to find the “real killers.” Meanwhile the Interpol’s red notices were put on ice while Argentina sought to widen its trade with Iran.
In 2015 an investigator, Alberto Nisman, accused Mrs. Kirchner of scheming with the Iranians to allow the Hezbollah and Iranian operatives to escape justice for their alleged role in the AMIA bombing. The night before Nisman was scheduled to present detailed evidence of his findings to Argentina’s congress, he was found dead in his apartment’s bathroom with a single gunshot to the head.
Mrs. Kirchner and her supporters in the press quickly spread the notion that Nisman committed suicide — a strange act for a man about to make public a case marking the culmination of his life’s work. Consequent investigations completely demolished the suicide theory.
Most notably, in 2017 a police unit, the Gendarmerie, presented detailed forensic evidence that concluded Nisman was murdered. During the presidency of Ms. Kirchner’s successor, Mauricio Macri, the suicide theory was widely discarded.
Even after Mr. Macri’s predsidency, his successor, Alberto Fernandez, “said to me personally he didn’t believe the suicide theory,” says Damian Pachter, an Argentinian journalist who first broke the news of Nisman’s 2015 death. (Following threats from members of Argentinian intelligence, Mr. Pachter fled the country.)
Since he beat Mr. Macri in last December’s presidential election, Mr. Fernandez changed his tune. His election victory was made possible after he decided to run on a joint ticket with Ms. Kirchner, who remains popular despite an indictment over her role in covering up the AMIA investigation.
So now President Fernandez says there is no proof Nisman was murdered.
So was it suicide? Murder? Can’t be both, although a documentary series on Nisman’s death, widely distributed on Netflix, tries to present both as possibilities. The six-part series claims to show “all sides”: Kirchner accolades insist on the suicide theory while others maintain he was murdered.
That is, both flat-earthers and scientists are given equal time.
Mr. Macri tried to end the charade. Mrs. Kirchner’s MOU with Iran was declared unconstitutional. During his tenure, Mrs. Kirchner and others were indicted on coverup charges. But he’s gone and she is vice president, and as such immune from incarceration.
Worse: in February the judge assigned to continue Nisman’s investigation into the terrorist cases, Claudio Bonadio, passed away after months-long bout with a brain tumor.
Kirchner loyalists were named as successors. And, as Toby Dershowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, in addition to Mrs. Kirchner eleven Argentinians were indicted in relation to the AMIA case — “and now some of them have influential jobs in the new government.”
So it looks like the government is set to wind down the AMIA investigations. The Iranian masterminds, Hezbollah operatives, and Argentine collaborators will not be brought to justice. Mr. Kirchner is protected from any accusation of complicity in Nisman’s death. Any hope of closure for terror victims’ loved ones is fast fading.
Yet, as Mr. Pachter, the reporter who fled Argentina to Israel, notes, a top perpetrator of the AMIA bombing, Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, was assassinated in Syria in 2008 by the Israelis. “So some justice was done after all,” Mr. Pachter says.
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Mr. Avni, a contributing editor of the Sun, covers the United Nations.
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