The Argentinian anti-terror police has arrested a 57 year old suspect after receiving a tip from Interpol of a possible plot targeting a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
“A week ago we received from Interpol offices in Manchester an alert about a possible attack against Sociedad Hebraica in Buenos,’’ Sergio Berni, Argentina's national security secretary told journalists.
The suspect was arrested in an internet cafe.
1,500 security personnel were deployed across 99 sites in the past week.
Julio Schlosser, the president of DAIA, the country’s umbrella group of Jewish organizations, said that “we are very satisfied by the actions of the police and the Justice Ministry in this case.”
In July 1994, a bomb attack against the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and injured 300, the worst attack of its kind ever to strike the South American country.
Earlier, in March 1992, a car bombing, later claimed by Islamic Jihad, outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires ikilled 29 people and wounded 200 others.
Argentina suspects that Iran is responsible for both attacks.
Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman has compiled compelling evidence of Iran’s role in the AMIA bombing attack.
Nisman believes that the final decision to attack the Jewish center was made by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in order to punish Argentina for discontinuing their nuclear cooperation with Iran.
The Argentinian government is presently under scrutiny for its reluctance to pursue the five Iranian suspected of planning the AMIA attack, among them Ahmad Vahidi, Iran’s Defense Minister at the time and a former senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohsen Rabbani, widely regarded as the architect of Iran’s growing terror network across Latin America.
Iran has offered to set up a "truth committee" along with Argentina to investigate the bombing.
In her speech to last month's annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner virulently blasted Jewish community leaders for their unwillingness to let Iran participate in the probe into the AMIA attack.
She declared: “The Jewish institutions that always support us, they turned against us. When we signed the agreement of cooperation with Iran it seemed that the internal and external demons were unleashed. Jewish institutions who had accompanied us turned against us. When we decided to cooperate they accused us of complicity with the State of Iran.”
The head of the Jewish community responded by saying that “we've always said that the Republic of Iran, or the terrorist state of Iran, is not a valid partner since they are not trustworthy in any memorandum that seeks the truth. The President tried to turn victims into victimizers. We were victims of terrorism. We are the victims of the only demon which is the Islamic Republic of Iran."