What is the cause and what is wanted today in the investigation into the AMIA attack

27 years after the attack against AMIA, Justice is focusing its investigation on two axes. One is to find Samuel Salman El Reda, which is seen as the link between the material authors and the intellectuals of the attack on the Jewish mutual. And the second is, starting with El Reda, to reach out to other people who were in the country to participate in the attack.

On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 a.m., the AMIA flew. 85 people died and 151 were injured. This is the second terrorist attack suffered by the country after the attack on the Israeli embassy on March 17, 1992.

What is already known from the judicial investigation is that the AMIA explosion was caused by a white van in traffic with between 300 and 400 kilograms of explosives (which was delivered by the reducer car Carlos Telleldín, for which he was tried and acquitted in December last year) and that the incident was carried out by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, linked to the Iranian government. We could know more but the judge, the prosecutors in charge of the case and the officials of the government of Carlos Menem to elucidate what happened are condemned for having hijacked and obstructed the judicial investigation.

In November 2006, the federal judge Corral Rodolfo Canicoba he ordered the international capture of those he considered the intellectual responsible for the affair. Today they have a red Interpol flyer Moshen Rezai, former leader of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran; Ali Fallahijan, former Minister of Intelligence; Moshen Rabbani, former cultural attaché in Argentina; Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the QUDS forces; Ahmad Asghari, former secretary of the Iranian embassy in Argentina; and in 2009 that of Samuel Salman El Reda. The former Iranian ambassador to the country at the time of the attack, Hadi SoleimanforHe also has a request for international detention but no red circular because Interpol does not apply them to diplomats.

One of the axes of the investigation today is to find El Reda, whose real name is not known by the courts but thinks it is Salman Raouf Salman, since he appears on his passport Iranian. In Argentina, he called himself Salman El Reda but several identities are suspected. Besides an Iranian passport, he had a fake Colombian passport, they had given him Paraguayan nationality and he wanted to get a Brazilian one.

El Reda was in Argentina when the attack occurred. The investigation determined it this way by a crossing of calls from telephone booths to the triple border, where he lived, and to relatives. He belongs to Hezbollah and has ties to Iran: his sister-in-law was Rabbani’s private secretary at the Iranian embassy. Rabbani was one of El Reda’s recruiters. The other defendants who were in the country on July 18, 1994 were Rabbani, Asghari and Soleimanpour.

But for Justice they were not the only ones. The investigation is in charge of the AMIA Tax Unit, made up of prosecutors Sebastián Basso and Julio Miranda and who was in charge of Alberto Nisman from its creation in 2004 until his death in 2015, and of the Federal Court 6 of Comodoro Py, now subrogated by the judge Maria Eugenie Capuchetti, due to the retirement in August of last year of its holder, Corral Rodolfo Canicoba. There is a competition open to designate its new owner.

The conviction of the prosecutor’s office is that on the day of the attack, there were more people who materially participated in the incident. “There were more people who were insured. There is a hypothesis that it would be a Hezbollah task force that entered the country and left quickly. El Reda is part of this group ”, Told Infobae a judicial source. And El Reda is the key because in this hypothesis it was the link between the material authors and the intellectuals.

With his family in Buenos Aires, who a few months before the attack went to Lebanon, El Reda lived on the triple border, recorded income in Buenos Aires. She is not in Argentina but her location is not known. Investigators believe it is in a country in the Middle East. “We assume that it is in some countries in this region that Hezbollah is stronger,” adds one of the researchers.

How do you manage after 27 years to identify more people? “Mainly with international cooperation in the search for information. Part of our job is to seek collaborations in other countries, ”the source explained. One of the countries we work with is Panama. A day after the AMIA attack, another happened in this country. It is about the explosion of a plane of the company “Alas Chiricanas” in which 18 people died, including 12 of the Jewish community.

Despite Interpol’s red circular arrest warrants and the fact that most of the defendants are Iranian politicians, they have not been detained. And many of them have traveled the world. The first obstacle is that, by law, Iran does not extradite any citizen. The second is that the international diplomatic detention mechanism does not function as an arrest inside the country.

Argentinian justice cannot intervene in another country, it does so through the national government. Whenever an accused is identified in another country, he must inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which processes the request to the other country and Interpol must intervene if he is based in that country. “There, geopolitics, relations and interests between countries also come into play. And also that in some Argentines, there is no diplomatic seat”, explains the source.

In 2011, Vahidi, then Iranian Minister of Defense, was in Bolivia and he was expelled by the government of that country when he found out who he was. And in 2019, Soleimanpour visited Turkey, which led to a request for explanations from that country’s ambassador to Argentina.

On the other hand, the AMIA prosecutor’s office is completing the classification, analysis and digitization of all the secret intelligence files held by the Argentine state and which in 2005 and 2015 ordered the declassification of the governments of Néstor and Cristina. Kirchner. “There was nothing that substantially changed what we had. The hard core was already known ”, A source explained what those documents revealed. 27 years have passed.

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