BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — Six former presidents of Argentina were summoned to testify in the investigation into the 1995 death of the son of ex-President Carlos Menem after he named Hezbollah as responsible.
Judge Villafuerte Ruzo on Wednesday requested the testimony of Fernando de la Rúa, Ramón Puerta, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, Eduardo Camaño, Eduardo Duhalde and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
The six ruled Argentina after Menem, who said last Friday that he believes his son was assassinated by Hezbollah — information that his then-foreign minister, Guido Di Tella, heard from foreign embassies in Buenos Aires. Menem was president from 1989 to 1999.
Menem’s lawyer, Omar Daer, told the TN news channel on Wednesday that his client also wants to know what kind of information the Security Secretariat had about Hezbollah’s possible involvement in the March 1995 accident of the helicopter that Carlos Menem Jr. was piloting when it crashed.
On Friday, Menem for the first time told a judge that Hezbollah killed his 26-year-old son.
“During my mandate as president of the nation there were three attacks. The first one, on the Israeli Embassy on March 17, 1992, the second struck the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina on July 18, 1994, and the third was on my own blood, ending the life of my son Carlos Menem Jr., on March 15, 1995,” Menem, currently a senator, said in written testimony before federal judge Carlos Villafuerte Ruzo.
The son of Syrians who immigrated to Argentina, Menem made the first official visit of an Argentine president to Israel two years after he was elected.
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