On Sunday, the Jewish state and people around the world commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the Hezbollah bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which was supported by Iran.
On March 17, 1992, at 2:15 p.m., a strong explosion shook the structure housing the diplomatic mission, killing 29 people—including six employees of the local embassy and three of the Israeli embassy—and injuring 242 other civilians.
An investigation into the attack was authorized by the Supreme Court of Argentina. It was discovered that the embassy building had been hit by a vehicle bomb. But in 1996, the court ruled that it was impossible to identify the perpetrator of this act of terrorism.The Argentine Supreme Court finally charged Hezbollah with carrying out the attack in May 1999 and issued an arrest warrant for leading terrorist Imad Mughniyeh (who would be killed in Damascus in 2008). The results of an Israeli investigation, which were made public in 2003, demonstrated that Hezbollah had been given permission to carry out the strike by the Iranian regime’s top authorities.
According to expert testimony, “the modus operandi of the attack was identical to the method employed two years previously in the attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires (an attack that the Argentinean Supreme Court found was the work of Islamic militants”),” according to a 2006 Argentine report detailing the terrorist attack that destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994.
No one has been prosecuted for these assaults. Israel is still persuaded that Iran was responsible for the bombings of the Jewish community center two years later and the embassy in 1992.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) paid respects to the more than 300 injured and 85 dead in the summer of 1994 by going to the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) headquarters last month.
Prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the lead investigator of the 1994 terrorist attack and an Argentine lawyer, was also honored by Rubio. He was discovered dead in 2015 at his Buenos Aires home, purportedly killed, before he could present his conclusions.On the location of the former embassy, a memorial was dedicated on November 20, 2007. “I will raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old,” reads the monument, which is a marble reproduction of the original embassy building’s column.
