Thirty years on from the terrorist attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre, the investigation into its perpetrators continues to provide novelties as if it were a story that every now and then provides a twist to catch everyone’s eye. Unfortunately, this chain of events also shows that a final resolution to the case seems never to arrive.
Last month, Ariel Lijo, deputy judge in the case investigating the attack and President Javier MIlei's nominee for a Supreme Court bench, decided to declassify a secret report by the Intelligence Secretariat prepared by former spy Antonio 'Jaime' Stiuso. The work is popularly known as the “Toma Report” but only because Miguel Ángel Toma was the head of the SIDE Intelligence Secretariat when Stiuso presented it during oral proceedings in court in 2003.
Today, 21 years later, that investigation contains some data which can be compared with other works conducted years later, including the report by Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and the work of the former head of the AMIA Special Investigation Unit Alejandro Rúa, who has just published a book called “30 días (30 days)”, where he provides a detailed account of the entire month of July, 1994. That is, the 17 days prior to the attack and the 12 days following it. In that work, Rúa reveals data which had never been assessed – Mossad took two feet and one leg which may have belonged to the person who drove the Renault Trafic van into the AMIA building, killing himself. What happened to those human remains? Nobody knows. They are not mentioned in Stiuso’s report, let alone in the rest of the case file. They are mentioned in the Mossad report revealed in July, 2022. The Mossad claims it knows the identity of the suicide bomber for sure, as does the former SIDE, probably informed by its Israeli colleagues. Both bodies claim he was a Lebanese citizen called Ibrahim Berro but a DNA sample found in the remains of the van used for the attack, analysed in 2017 tested negative and so far, the two feet and left leg found there have never been tested. At this juncture, the chain of custody of those remains may also be seriously questioned.
Regarding the motives, why did they attack the AMIA association? The main argument raised by Argentine courts is that Iran was peeved because during Carlos Menem’s government a contract was breached whereby it had been agreed to provide them with nuclear technology. The Mossad says that the attack was a “response to two great actions of ours in Lebanon.” This is in addition to other terrorist attacks in 1994 against the Jewish community around the world: in March a car bomb was found in Bangkok, Thailand, ready to explode in that country’s Israeli Embassy. The day after the AMIA attack in Panama, a terrorist crashed a plane where a significant number of Israeli citizens were travelling. More specifically, Mossad investigators who came to this country to work on the AMIA attack then went to Panama. On July 26, the Jewish community in London also suffered an attack. That is, the world was on alert.
As for the future, in judicial terms, the most relevant piece of news is that on the day of the 30th anniversary of the attack, the government introduced a bill to conduct a trial in absentia to sentence the defendants, even if they may never end up in jail.
The Mossad report also leaves data bearing no relationship to the AMIA attack, but sets the standard for the new objectives of Israeli intelligence in the present. In 1994, the main suspect of the attack was the diplomat and imam Mohsen Rabbani, who was even already suspected by Argentine agents and who was being followed the morning of the attack. In its 2022 report, the Mossad claims that a man called Ruben Assad is “Mohsen Rabbani’s heir in Latin America.” All eyes are on him.
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