Argentina has asked Interpol to arrest Iran’s interior minister for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
Iranian minister Ahmad Vahidi is part of a delegation from Tehran currently visiting Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and Interpol has issued a red alert requesting his arrest at the request of Argentina, the ministry said in a statement.
Argentina also asked these two governments to arrest Vahidi, he added.
On April 12, a court in Argentina blamed Iran for the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and for a bombing two years earlier against the Israeli embassy that killed 29 people.
The 1994 attack was never claimed or resolved, but Argentina and Israel have long suspected that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah carried it out at Iran’s request.
Prosecutors have accused Iranian authorities of ordering the attack, although Tehran has denied any involvement.
The court also implicated Hezbollah and called the attack against AMIA – the deadliest in Argentine history – a “crime against humanity”.
Tuesday’s statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Argentina seeks the international arrest of those responsible for the 1994 AMIA attack, which killed 85 people, and who remain in their positions with complete impunity.”
“One of them is Ahmad Vahidi, wanted by Argentine justice as one of those responsible for the attack against AMIA,” states the statement, which was co-signed by the Ministry of Security.
Argentina previously claimed that Vahidi, a former senior member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, is one of the main masterminds of the AMIA bombing and requested his extradition.
– Decade probe –
In their decision this month, the Argentine judges examined the geopolitical context at the time of the attacks and found that they corresponded to foreign policy positions toward Iran under then-Argentine President Carlos Menem (1989-1999).
The “origin of the attacks lies mainly in the government’s unilateral decision – motivated by a change in our country’s foreign policy between the end of 1991 and mid-1992 – to cancel three contracts for the supply of nuclear equipment and technology concluded with Iran,” concluded the court.
The judges assigned blame to Iran’s then-president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Bahramaie Rafsanjani, as well as other Iranian officials and members of Hezbollah.
In 2006, Argentine courts requested the extradition of eight Iranians, including Rafsanjani and Vahidi, who served as defense minister when Mahmud Ahmadinejad was president.
In 2013, then-president Cristina Kirchner signed a memorandum with Iran under which Argentine prosecutors could interrogate suspects outside Argentina.
The Jewish community in Argentina expressed outrage and accused the president of orchestrating a cover-up.
A prosecutor named Alberto Nisman opened an investigation in 2015, when Kirchner was in the final year of his second term.
Shortly before testifying before Congress, Nisman was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head. The cause of death – suicide or murder – remains a mystery.
The Argentine judicial system ended up abandoning the investigation into Kirchner.
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