A witness has said during sealed testimony that the Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires some eight years ago that killed 87 people and then paid Argentina's president at the time, Carlos Menem an amount of $10 million to cover it up, according to The New York Times.
A transcript of a highly secret deposition, provided to The NY Times by Argentine officials, distressed that the case remains unsolved, backs long-held suspicions of Iranian involvement and adds to the wide-range of questions surrounding the conduct of an inquiry that has been abundant with irregularities right from the beginning.
According to the report published on Monday, evidence has disappeared, leads have been ignored and witnesses have been threatened and apparently even bribed.
The witness, a high-ranking defector from the Islamic Republic of Iran's intelligence agency, who gave his name as Abdulghassem Mesbahi, said Menem, who served as Argentina’s president from 1989 to 1999, benefited for years from his close relations to Iranian intelligence officials.
They courted him as an essential contact, Mesbahi said, for his winning combination of rising political power, Muslim ancestry and links to Argentina's small but influential Syrian-Lebanese community.
The bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association on July 18, 1994, the worst bombing attack ever carried out in the Argentinean capital, continues to haunt Menem, who is once again a leading candidate for president.
Menem, for his part, declined a request for an interview to review the matter, however, Alberto Kohan, his former chief of staff and currently an important campaign adviser, suggested that the accusations were politically motivated and denied any official cover-up.
"Every intelligence agency in the world had free passage in Argentina to investigate this case," Kohan said. "We were completely open. We did everything that the courts asked for. There are people in custody, there is a trial and there is an inquiry under way. We would all like to know who did it. President Menem was totally clear about that at the time."
On their part, Iranian officials in Tehran have denied involvement in the bombing. "The report is totally baseless and a journalistic fairy tale," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi said, according to the students' news agency ISNA. "Such undocumented claims are constantly raised by Zionist (Israeli) circles after having failed to identify the real elements behind the bombing," he said.
Argentine officials say that they are not sure of the current whereabouts of Mesbahi, except that he remains under Germany's protection, and that they do not know if the name he provided is indeed his real name.
Mesbahi had said the planning for the attack in Buenos Aires started back in 1992, led by Mohsen Rabbani, cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and supervised by Hamid Naghashan, a high-level official of the Iranian intelligence agency.
One cell focused on "cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack," Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. "Another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives" in Brazil, he expressed, according to The NY Times.
Meanwhile, Nilda Garr, who led the Argentine government's anti-terrorism unit in the years 2000 and 2001, and additional Argentine officials said Mesbahi's account had been confirmed by another Iranian who had visited the Argentine Embassy in the Iranian capital twice.
Mesbahi said that following the attack, negotiations took place in Tehran with an emissary, a bearded man of about 50 years of age, sent by Menem. The result was that "$10 million was deposited into a numbered account that Menem had indicated," Mesbahi said, paid from a $200 million Swiss account controlled by Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Iran's president at the time, and by a son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In return, according to Mesbahi, Menem agreed to "make declarations that there was no evidence against Iran that it was responsible."
Early this year, in the meantime, the Swiss government acknowledged that it had been asked to check data supplied by the Iranian informant. Eamon Mullen, the Argentine government's chief prosecutor in the case, said in an interview that investigators had confirmed that a deposit had been made into an account controlled by Menem at the bank named by Mesbahi and in the amount he had specified.
"But it is not known who made the deposit or on what date," Mullen said, leaving open the possibility that the said payment could have possibly been a payoff for other acts of corruption of which Menem has been accused or from some other source.
Carlos Menem
Menem, 72, who served two consecutive terms as Argentina's president, stood down amid swirling accusations of rampant corruption in his administration.
Carlos Menem was born in the Rioja Province of Argentina in 1930 of Syrian parents. He trained as a lawyer and became a lifelong supporter of President Juan Peron. He was elected governor of the La Rioja Province in 1973, a position which gave him national prominence during the last years of Peron's presidency.
In 1989, Menem was elected president of Argentina. Menem took over from President Raul Alfonsin.
Menem's government got caught up in a scandal involving the illegal sale of arms to Croatia and to Ecuador in the early 1990s. Many in Argentina began to feel that he was out of touch after too many years in power.
Many analysts took his announcement that he would not run for re-election in 1999 as a sign that his political career was over. But shortly after the announcement, Menem confirmed what many already suspected - he wanted to stand in the presidential elections to be held in 2003. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
