Iran Focus
London, 21 Jul – An Argentinian judge has requested that Singapore and Malaysia arrest an Iranian adviser who stands accused of planning the worst terrorist attack in the South American country’s history.
Ali Akbar Velayati was the Foreign Minister of Iran when the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires was bombed in 1994, which killed 85 people. The belief is that Tehran masterminded the attack and Hezbollah carried it out.
Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said that his request only reinforced existing arrest orders. Eight Iranian officials and a Hezbollah terrorist have been on Interpol’s capture list for years but Argentine officials have never been able to question them.
This has given rise to many inconclusive inquiries and accused cover-ups; President Nestor Kirchner took office in Argentina, in 2003, and vowed to get to the bottom. He even appointed a special prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, to investigate.
In 2013, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner established a joint “truth commission” to investigate the bombing but this attracted lots of flack and was declared “unconstitutional” in 2014.
The Iranians, Ahmed Vahidi, Ali Fallahijan, Mohsen Rezai, Mohsen Rabbani and Ahmad Reza Asghari, were members of the Quds Force, Intelligence chiefs, commanders in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Force.
The Hezbollah operative, Imad Mughniyah, was killed in a bomb blast in Damascus in 2008.
Velayati is currently visiting Southeast Asia as an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
According to the investigations by Prosecutor Nisman, the plan to blow up the Jewish center in Buenos Aires was discussed at a meeting of the Iranian regime’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) on August 14, 1993 by Khamenei, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (then President), Ali Akbar Velayati (then Foreign Minister), and Ali Fallahian (then Minister of Intelligence). Once the decision for the bombing was finalized, Khamenei tasked the intelligence ministry and the IRGC Quds Force with carrying out the bombing.
The current Iranian regime’s president, Hassan Rouhani, was also on the special government committee that plotted the bombing in Buenos Aires, according to an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.
In the supplemented indictment, as well as the original one that was presented to court in 2006, the special prosecutor referred to press conferences, interviews and press statements by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) that disclosed exact details of the Iranian regime’s role in this crime.
On August 10, 1994, three weeks after the AMIA bombing, in a press conference in Washington DC in the presence of dozens of reporters, the Iranian Resistance underscored that the AMIA bombing had been planned and organized by the Iranian regime’s Supreme National Security Council.
