Today marks the 17th anniversary of the devastating bombing attack on Argentina’s Jewish community center, the AMIA building. In Buenos Aires today, a siren sounded at 9:53 a.m. this morning — the moment the attack took place in 1994 — as a crowd gathered in front of the since-rebuilt AMIA building. The attack, which killed 85 and injured some 300 people, remains the deadliest bombing in the country’s history and took place two years after the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.
While Iran and Hezbollah have long been accused of involvement, no arrests have been made in the case, owing largely to early allegations of mismanagement and eventual corruption charges that led to the dismissal of a judge in 2003. On Saturday, the Iranian government released a statement claiming it would cooperate in the Argentinian government’s probe, although the director of the Family of the Victims of the AMIA Bombing dismissed the gesture as "disgustingly hyprocratic," as reported by Argentina’s Pagina 12 news agency.
While the Jewish community’s sense of security was forever shaken by the event, they do not feel alone this year, as Argentinian celebrities and other prominent figures have banded together in a PR campaign to bring the perpetrators to justice.
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