Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: La Nación via Wikimedia Commons
The ruins of the AMIA Jewish Community Center after the 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires
(JNS) — Argentine President Javier Milei will submit a bill to try in absentia the Iranian suspects in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300 others.
“Although they may never be able to serve a sentence, they will not be able to escape the eternal condemnation of a court proving their guilt in front of the whole world,” Milei said at a memorial on Wednesday night, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the attack.
The president said that while the decision in April to issue an arrest warrant for Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi due to his alleged role in the terrorist attack was an “enormous step,” Buenos Aires still had more to do due to the “cover-up by the terrorist state of Iran.”
Milei vowed to beef up intelligence efforts to prevent future attacks and to allocate further government resources towards the AMIA investigation.
“Today we chose to speak out, not stay silent,” he said in his remarks at the memorial. “We’re raising our voice, not folding our arms. We choose life, because anything else is making a game out of death.”
Milei compared Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel — the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — to the 1994 bombing, which has been called the worst modern-day attack against Jews outside Israel.
He also demanded that Hamas release the 120 hostages, including eight Argentines, still held captive in Gaza after 286 days of war.
In April, Argentina asked Interpol to arrest Vahidi. The country accused Vahidi, a former official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, of being one of the masterminds behind the attack.
Earlier that month, the Court of Cassation in Buenos Aires issued a ruling blaming the Islamic Republic for orchestrating the July 18, 1994, bombing, using its terrorist proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
In February, Milei visited the Jewish state on one of his first overseas trips since being elected president four months earlier. The three-day solidarity visit signaled a shift in Buenos Aires’s policy towards the United States and Israel after decades of backing Arab countries.
Upon landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, Milei immediately reiterated his pledge to move his nation’s embassy to Jerusalem and open a new chapter in bilateral relations. He said he was working on a project to designate Hamas a terrorist organization, calling this “one more token of the historical closeness and support and friendship between our peoples.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Milei during a meeting in Jerusalem, “Your stalwart support for Israel in so many forms is deeply, deeply appreciated. Welcome to Jerusalem. Welcome, friend.”
