We need Nancy Drew.
When I was growing up in northern Manhattan, my parents had a journalist friend, perhaps a role model for me. John Kayston worked for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.Today the JTA in Buenos Aires published an important update to the investigation of the AMIA Jewish center there:
Argentine judicial officials made public the 300-page criminal complaint that details evidence linking Argentina;s senior political echelon to a deal to hide Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center.
The complaint prepared by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was to be presented this week to Argentina’s congress, but Nisman was found dead in his home late Sundya with a gunshot wound to his head.
Pres.Cristian Fernandez initially called his death a suicide but backtracked Thursday following large protests and the widespread perception that Nisman [had been] murdered.
Nisman’s criminal complaint, based on intelligence intercepts, accuses Kirchner of ‘deciding, negotiating, and arranging the imputnity of the Iranian fugitives in aht AMIA case.†The pres​i​dent and Argentina’s foreign minister, Hector Timerman, ‘took the criminal decision of inventing Iran’s i​n​ nocence to satisfy commercial, political, and geopolitical interests of the Argentine Republic,†the complaint says.
The deal… exonerated Iranian officials in their role in the bombing, which killed 85 people, in exchange for Iranian oil and weapons sales, according to the complaint. The secret deal, the complaint says, was negotiated two years before Iran and Argentina signed a public memorandum of understanding in 2013 to establish a joint investigation of the AMIA bombing, a agreement critics derided as a farce and which later was derailed by Argentine cournts. In the decade Nisman spent purs​u​ing the AMIA case, he uncovered evidence showing aht Iran sponsored the bombing and had Hezbollah, its proxy militia in Lebanon, carry it out. Interpol, the international police agency, eventually issued arrest warrants from several Iranian officials in the case. The arrests have never been carried out.
