News Brief

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has denounced Iran for blaming “Zionist and Argentine agents” for the AMIA Jewish community center bombing.

In a document titled “The AMIA case: From the beginning to present,” the Islamic Republic News Agency, the official Iranian news agency, on its Web site offers its version of the July 18, 1994 attack that killed 85 and wounded more than 300. The events in the AMIA case “demonstrate the existence of a premeditated conspiracy in which the role is clear of international Zionism and its Argentine agents,” it says. “Both the language and the content of this report show a conspiratorial approach which seems taken from the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ the fabricated anti-Semitic libel of an alleged Jewish plan for world domination, and has become the Bible for contemporary Jew hatred,” Shimon Samuels, director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a news release.

Several Iranian government officials were indicted in the attack. Interpol has issued warrants for their arrest. Sergio Widder, Latin American representative of the Wiesenthal Center, in speaking about the news agency document, said in the release: “This propaganda effort manipulates some real data combined with obvious falsehoods. The indictment by Argentina’s Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman clearly shows the responsibility of former Iranian government officials and Hezbollah leadership in the AMIA bombing. Indeed, the findings of the Argentine prosecutor have led to warrants by Interpol.”