Argentine Jews slam late president Carlos Menem over impunity for deadly terror attacks.
Argentina’s Jewish community has expressed regret over the fact that the country’s former president, Carlos Menem, died at the end of last week without having “paid for his responsibility” in the cover-up of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994.
In a series of tweets following the death of Menem over the weekend at the age of 90, the DAIA — Argentina’s Jewish communal body — recalled that he had been president during two of the most deadly terrorist attacks in Argentina’s history: the AMIA bombing and the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier.
The embassy attack on March 17, 1992, claimed the lives of 29 people, with nearly 250 wounded. The AMIA atrocity of July 18, 1994, took the lives of 85 people, with another 300 wounded.
Both attacks were suicide bombings orchestrated by Iranian and Hezbollah operatives who escaped arrest and prosecution.
In Feb. 2020, Menem was cleared by an Argentine court of having derailed the investigation into the AMIA bombing.
According to the DAIA’s tweets, “the lack of attention, negligence and, above all, complicity with those suspected of having committed these crimes explain why today, both massacres remain unpunished.”
The organization said that Menem had died a free man “despite his government’s use of Argentine state institutions to perpetuate impunity and cover up the responsibility of those who committed and were complicit in the attacks.”
It noted that Menem had been “protected until his last day by his senatorial privileges that prevented him from being imprisoned.”
Concluded DAIA: “He never paid for his responsibility in the AMIA bombing cover-up.”