The Argentine Supreme Court has released a report claiming that the March 17, 1992, bombing of the Israeli Embassy here was not carried out by means of a car bomb, as government investigators previously believed.
In a communique issued this week, the court said that “technical studies” support the thesis that the powerful bomb that leveled the embassy “was placed inside the building and not on the curb.”
“The conclusion is that the explosive was placed in a service room close to the main hall of the building, on the ground floor,” said Supreme Court Justice Julio Nazareno.
“By no means can this be construed as blaming the Israeli Embassy for the explosion; it is just a technical study,” the judge said.
But the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Israel’s ambassador to Argentina countered the court’s conclusion, saying that they did not believe that the bomb had been placed inside the building.
“We categorically reject the evaluations published by the Supreme Court in Argentina,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry also accused the court of dragging its feet in the investigation, which it said has made “no progress toward identifying the perpetrators.”
The Israeli ambassador to Buenos Aires, Itzhak Aviran, was quoted as saying, “In four years, the court did nothing to investigate.”
“Now they need to prove they are working on the case, so they come up with this report.”
The embassy bombing killed 29 people and left more than 100 injured.
The Argentine government has come under constant attack from Jewish officials here and abroad for its inability to find those responsible for the embassy attack.
The July 18, 1994, bombing of the Jewish community’s headquarters here, which left 86 dead and more than 300 wounded, also remains unsolved.
In December 1995, a group of private investigators and a material witness told the Argentine Supreme Court that they suspected that no car bombs were used either in the embassy bombing or the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association, also known as AMIA.
According to the investigators, the bombs used in both terror attacks had been placed inside the buildings or inside large cast-iron containers used to remove construction debris.
They said both the embassy and AMIA buildings were being renovated at the time of the attacks and that there were large containers for hauling away rubble parked at the entrances of the buildings when the bombs were detonated.
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