MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine prosecutors accuse Iran and Hezbollah

Argentine prosecutors formally charged the Iranian government and the Lebanese militia group, Hezbollah, over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires killing 85 and injuring 200.

The decision to attack the centre "was undertaken in 1993 by the highest authorities of the then-government of Iran meeting in the city of Mashhad" prosecutor Alberto Nisman said at a news conference, adding that the actual attack was entrusted to the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah. Iran's government has vehemently denied any involvement in the attack following repeated accusations by Jewish community and other leaders in Buenos Aires.

The blast on 18 July 1994 reduced the seven-storey Jewish-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA) community centre in Buenos Aires to rubble. Nobody has ever been convicted of the attack, but the current government of President Nestor Kirchner has said it is determined to secure justice.

Nisman and fellow prosecutor Marcelo Martinez Burgos implicated former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who held office from 1989 to 1997, and asked for the detention of Iran's former intelligence chief, Ali Fallahijan, and former Foreign Minister Ali Ar Velayati.

They also urged the arrest of two former commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, two former Iranian diplomats and a former Hezbollah security chief for external affairs.

Nisman and fellow prosecutor Marcelo Martinez Burgos said they suspected that Hezbollah undertook activities outside Lebanon only "under orders directly emanating from the regime in Tehran."

Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral had no public comments following the news conference. The judge, under Argentine law, is allowed an indefinite amount of time to accept or reject the recommendations.

The two prosecutors head a special investigative unit probing the attack, which was created after Argentina's federal courts in 2004 halted a botched investigation into the case by then-judge Juan Jose Galeano.

Nisman announced in November 2005 that investigators believed a suspected 21-year-old Lebanese Hezbollah militant had been identified as the suicide bomber.

The attack on the AMIA centre came two years after a bomb destroyed Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people, in another case that Argentine courts never resolved. Argentina is home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America.

In court documents, the prosecutor linked the AMIA attack to Argentina's decision to stop providing Iran with nuclear technology and materials.

But former Argentine President Carlos Menem, who ruled from 1989 to 1999, said he believed both attacks could have been a response to Buenos Aires' decision to back the United States in the first Gulf War and to his own state visit to Israel.