The Jewish state and people worldwide on Sunday marked the 32nd anniversary of the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
At 2:15 p.m. on March 17, 1992, a powerful explosion rocked the building housing the diplomatic mission, killing 29 people, including three Israeli embassy personnel and six local embassy employees, and wounding 242 other civilians.
The Argentine Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the attack. It found that a truck bomb had struck the embassy building. However, the court in 1996 claimed it was impossible to determine who was responsible for this act of terrorism.
In May 1999, the Argentine Supreme Court finally accused Hezbollah of the attack and issued an arrest warrant for top terrorist commander Imad Mughniyeh (who would be assassinated in Damascus in 2008). An Israeli probe, whose findings were made public in 2003, showed that the highest levels of the Iranian regime had authorized Hezbollah to carry out the bombing.
A 2006 Argentine report detailing the terrorist attack that destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, noted that 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 Jihad in its capacity as the military wing of Hezbollah).”
No one has been brought to justice for these attacks. Israel remains convinced of Iranian responsibility for the bombing of the embassy in 1992 and of the Jewish community center two years later.
Last month, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) visited the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building to honor the 85 people who were killed and the more than 300 who were wounded in the summer of 1994.
Rubio also memorialized prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the Argentine attorney and chief investigator of the 1994 terrorist attack, who was found dead at his home in Buenos Aires in 2015, reportedly murdered, before he could reveal his findings.
On Nov. 20, 2007, a memorial was inaugurated on the site of the former embassy. A marble replica of the column of the original embassy building, the monument bears the verse of the prophet Amos: “I will raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old.”
