ARGENTINA: Not One Suspect in Israeli Embassy Bombing

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 17 1998 (IPS) - Relatives of the 29 victims of the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, which occurred six years ago Tuesday, met in honour of their loved ones and to express their frustration over the lack of progress made in the investigation.

There is not a single detainee or even suspect in the attack, which preceded the even bloodier 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre, the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), which left 86 dead.

Israeli Ambassador Itzhak Aviran said Tuesday that he could not understand “why the local connection was not sufficiently investigated” – a reference to the local support needed to carry out the Mar. 17, 1992 attack.

Carlos Susevich, the father of one of the victims, said that not only had there been no headway in the case, but “there have been setbacks.”

“We are in a worse position than six years ago, because time rubs out clues that would help lead us to the perpetrators,” said Susevich, whose daughter’s death left her three children – one of them disabled – orphans.

Susevich and others who lost loved ones in the bombing say the case will never be resolved. They blame the Supreme Court of Justice – in charge of the investigation because the bombing occurred in a foreign legation – for having ignored valuable testimony and lost time with “absurd” theories.

One of those is the hypothesis of an internal explosion in the basement of the embassy caused by a supposed weapons arsenal.

A leader of Argentina’s Jewish community – Latin America’s largest – said this week that the lack of commitment to investigate the first bombing paved the way for the 1994 attack on AMIA, in which employees and members of the community centre were killed, as well as neighbours and people who just happened to be passing by the seven-story building when it collapsed.

Although the investigation into the embassy bombing made no progress after the AMIA attack, some data obtained in the probe into the second bombing reportedly pointed to a connection between the two cases.

The strongest connection was provided by the testimony of Wilson Dos Santos, a Brazilian national who went missing after reporting that he knew the people who bombed the embassy. Two weeks before the attack on AMIA, Dos Santos warned authorities of the possibility of a second bombing, but his warning did not lead to any action.

Last year the Supreme Court released its only report on the case, which brought an outcry from the government of Israel and the families of the victims, because it rejected testimony and reports by local and foreign experts which supported the theory that the explosion was caused by a car-bomb.

In the report, three engineers contracted by the Supreme Court maintain – as several justices had earlier suggested – that the explosion was produced inside the embassy, an explanation that would transfer responsibility for the attack to the Israeli government.

The report contradicts those drawn up by police experts and specialists hired by the Jewish community, as well as the testimony of the director of civil defence, who said she saw a crater in the sidewalk produced by the explosion of a vehicle, immediately after the bombing.

Police experts say a Ford F-100 utility vehicle crashed into the embassy just when the police guards abandoned their posts. The same thing reportedly occurred in the AMIA attack, in connection with which several police are under investigation.

The judge presiding over the investigation of the AMIA attack has tried several police officers allegedly involved in purchasing the vehicle used in the bombing, which was reportedly delivered to a “suicide commando” that exploded the vehicle in front of the community centre.

The only new development in the past few months was a Supreme Court statement reporting “evidence” that a pro-Iran Islamic group was behind the two bombings.

The families of the victims of the embassy attack met Tuesday with Active Memory, a group made up of the relatives of the victims of the AMIA bombing, to remember their loved ones and urge authorities to put an end to the “obstruction and diversion of the investigations.”