Decade-old bombing in Argentina jumps back into the light

A former investigator of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in the Argentine capital, in which 85 people were killed and hundreds were injured, said he would reveal everything he knows about the terrorist attack and the alleged cover-up.

this will be interesting... president nestor kirchner is ostensibly committed to transparency although there are plenty of argentinians who don't think he's all that serious... his popularity remains high, however, due to the continuing economic improvement following the currency collapse of 2001... since the investigation of this tragic event has been nothing but a comedy of errors, since no one has been indicted in the ten years that have passed, and since the case is still open and unresolved, perhaps it's now time for things to break loose...

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Criminal lawyer Claudio Lifschitz, a former federal police intelligence agent, was named chief investigator to federal Judge Juan José Galeano in 1995 in the investigation of the attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA).

No one has yet been convicted in connection with the bombing.

Lifschitz worked with Galeano until 1997, when he resigned. In 2000 he accused the judge of taking part in a cover-up by the government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999) designed to steer the case into a dead-end alley. Galeano has since been removed from the case.

The investigation, now in the hands of prosecuting Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, points in the direction of members of the pro-Iranian Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which also has support from Syria, and diplomats from Iran, who are facing arrest warrants issued in connection with the case nearly a decade ago.

From the very start, the investigators believed the attack was carried out with local logistical support, which may have come from Argentine security bodies.

The probe focused in that direction over the past decade, until it turned into a complete fiasco, fraught with irregularities and outright crimes committed by people involved in the investigation.

According to Lifschitz, the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) was able to infiltrate Iranian ”sleeper cells” in Argentina months before the attack.

SIDE thus found out about plans to bomb the AMIA building, and decided to mount a ”controlled operation” in which it even ”provided logistical support for the attack”, with the idea of aborting at the last moment, Lifschitz told IPS.

But things ”got out of hand,” he added.

sounds a little bit like an episode from jerry springer - "when keystone cops go bad..."

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