http://www.libertaddigital.com/./noticias/noticia_1275311989.html
Irán sobornó a Menem para que ocultara su implicación en el atentado contra la mutualidad judía
El Gobierno de Teherán pagó 10 millones de dólares al entonces presidente de Argentina, Carlos Saúl Menem, para que encubriera el papel de Irán en el atentado contra la mutualidad judía AMIA en Buenos Aires en 1994, en el que murieron 86 personas. El dato ha sido revelado por un antiguo agente de inteligencia de la República Islámica.
L D (AFP) El testigo, un desertor que fue un agente de alto nivel en los servicios de inteligencia del régimen de los ayatolas, ha dicho en una declaración secreta ante un juzgado argentino que Menem recibió un pago desde una cuenta de un banco suizo controlada por el entonces presidente de Irán, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, según informa The New York Times.
El rotativo estadounidense publica que recibió una copia de la declaración de manos de investigadores argentinos, quienes están frustrados por la falta de progreso en las investigaciones sobre la acción terrorista contra la Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), que dejó 86 muertos y unos 200 heridos. Este atentado ha sido el más sangriento cometido en Iberoamérica y, en el conjunto del continente americano, sólo ha sido superado en número de víctimas por los realizados contra EEUU el 11 de septiembre del año pasado.
Aunque diferentes fuentes señalaron, desde que comenzaron las investigaciones, la vinculación de Irán en el atentado, el Gobierno de Teherán siempre lo ha negado y las autoridades argentinas tardaron muy poco en frenar esa línea de la investigación.
----------------------
Iran Blew Up Jewish Center in Argentina, Defector Says
By LARRY ROHTER
UENOS AIRES, July 21 — The Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing of a Jewish community center here eight years ago that killed 85 people and then paid Argentina's president at the time, Carlos Saúl Menem, $10 million to cover it up, a witness in the case has said in sealed testimony.
A 100-page transcript of a secret deposition, provided to The New York Times by Argentine officials frustrated that the case remains unsolved, supports long-held suspicions of Iranian involvement and adds to the questions surrounding the conduct of an inquiry that has been rife with irregularities from the start.
Evidence has disappeared, leads have been ignored and witnesses have been threatened and apparently bribed.
According to the witness, a high-level defector from Iran's intelligence agency who gave his name as Abdolghassem Mesbahi, Mr. Menem, who was president from 1989 to 1999, benefited for years from his ties to Iranian intelligence officials.
They courted him as a valuable contact, Mr. Mesbahi said, for his combination of rising political power, Muslim ancestry and connections to Argentina's small but influential Syrian-Lebanese community.
Mr. Menem, who is once again a leading candidate for president, has already been tainted by political corruption scandals and spent six months under house arrest last year on charges that he had overseen an illegal arms smuggling operation while in office.
But the bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association on July 18, 1994, the worst terror attack ever carried out here, continues to haunt him and all levels of the Argentine government as a symbol of the absence of accountability that in recent months has brought this country to the brink of collapse.
Through intermediaries, Mr. Menem declined a request for an interview to discuss the case. But Alberto Kohan, his former chief of staff and now an important campaign adviser, suggested that the accusations were politically motivated and denied any official cover-up.
"Every intelligence agency in the world had free passage in Argentina to investigate this case," Mr. Kohan said. "We were completely open. We did everything that the courts asked for. There are people in custody, there is a trial and there is an inquiry under way. We would all like to know who did it. President Menem was totally clear about that at the time."
Iranian officials in Tehran have denied involvement in the bombing. Officials at the Iranian Embassy here declined to discuss the case by telephone and did not respond to a request for comment by fax.
Mr. Mesbahi, the Iranian defector who provided the testimony, met with Argentine investigators in Germany in 1998 and again in Mexico in 2000, speaking at various times in Persian, English, German and French with a Spanish-language translator present.
Argentine officials say that they are not sure of his current whereabouts, except that he remains under Germany's protection, and that they do not know if the name he gave is his real name.
Argentine and German officials describe him as a senior operative who has provided valuable information about Iranian terrorist operations in Europe and Asia through the mid-1990's. He defected to Germany in 1996, reportedly because he was upset at his agency's involvement in the killing of dissident intellectuals in Iran and abroad.
Mr. Mesbahi said the planning for the attack in Buenos Aires began in 1992, led by Mohsen Rabbani, cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and supervised by Hamid Naghashan, a senior official of the Iranian intelligence agency.
One cell focused on "cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack," Mr. Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. "Another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives" in Brazil, he said.
Nilda Garré, who led the Argentine government's antiterrorism unit in 2000 and 2001, and other Argentine officials said Mr. Mesbahi's account had been confirmed by another Iranian who had visited the Argentine Embassy in Tehran twice.
Immigration and Foreign Ministry records here confirm, the officials said, that several Iranians who were said to have been involved in the plot visited Argentina in the months preceding the bomb attack.
Mr. Mesbahi said that after the attack, negotiations took place in Tehran with an emissary, a bearded man of about 50, sent by Mr. Menem. The result was that "$10 million was deposited into a numbered account that Menem had indicated," Mr. Mesbahi said, paid from a $200 million Swiss account controlled by Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Iran's president at the time, and by a son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In return, Mr. Mesbahi said, Mr. Menem agreed to "make declarations that there was no evidence against Iran that it was responsible."
The Menem government initially blamed Iran, but the cumulative effect of later statements, arguing that there was insufficient proof, has been to sow uncertainty about responsibility for the bombing.
Early this year the Swiss government acknowledged that it had been asked to look into information supplied by the Iranian informant. Eamon Mullen, the Argentine government's chief prosecutor in the case, said in an interview that investigators had confirmed that a deposit had been made into an account controlled by Mr. Menem at the bank named by Mr. Mesbahi and in the amount he had specified.
"But it is not known who made the deposit or on what date," Mr. Mullen said, leaving open the possibility that the payment could have been a payoff for other acts of corruption of which Mr. Menem has been accused or from some other source.
After the bombing, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran's supreme leader and still holds that post, publicly expressed his approval.
"By gathering together groups of Jews with records of murder, theft, wickedness and hooliganism from throughout the world," Ayatollah Khamenei said, "the Zionist regime has created an entity under the name of the Israeli nation that only understands the logic of terror and crimes."
In his testimony, Mr. Mesbahi said Iran's contacts with Mr. Menem began in the mid-1980's when he was the governor of La Rioja Province. Because Mr. Menem was of Arab descent and they believed him to share their anti-Jewish sentiments, the Iranians covertly funneled money to Mr. Menem in hopes that he would be elected president and pursue policies favorable to Iran, Mr. Mesbahi said.
"The companies that worked for Menem sold their products at a high price to Iran, which accepted those prices because it knew what those high prices were paying for," Mr. Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. "A lot of money went to the companies that supported the Menem campaign."
After Mr. Menem became president in 1989, he consolidated his power by packing the Supreme Court with close political associates including a former law partner and by placing loyalists in key posts in the national security and intelligence apparatus.
But he enraged the Muslim countries that hoped to take advantage of his rise, which included Libya as well as Syria, where he and his wife at the time both had relatives.
Mr. Menem instead pursued what he called "a carnal relationship" with the United States, apparently yielding to pressure from Washington not to sell weapons or advanced technology to Iran, Libya or Syria, and became the first Argentine head of state to visit Israel.
Argentine officials say the bombing at the Jewish community center was strikingly similar to an attack on the Israeli Embassy here in 1992, in which 28 people died. In both cases a car bomb was used, the targeted building was undergoing repairs and police officers on a security detail inexplicably vanished just before the explosion.
In what he said was a demonstration of his intention to get to the bottom of the Israeli Embassy attack, Mr. Menem put the Argentine Supreme Court in charge of the investigation.
But that inquiry was botched so badly that it now figures in the list of offenses in impeachment proceedings against the justices and, critics say, encouraged the attack two years later on the community center.
"The inaction of the Argentine state, the absolute absence of investigation, showed terrorists that they could act in Argentina without the slightest fear of consequences," Sergio Widder, South American representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview here. He said the inaction had "inspired a level of confidence" that made the attack on the commnity center possible.
After the second attack, Mr. Menem had the cases handed over to an investigative magistrate, Judge Juan José Galeano, rather than the Supreme Court.
But Judge Galeano's conduct of the inquiry, which is continuing, at least on paper, has been so bizarre and brought so much criticism that he is now himself being investigated on charges of improper behavior that could lead to his removal from the bench.
"From the start the Argentine government, especially in the person of Judge Galeano, has never shown a will to investigate and clear up this matter," said Alberto Zuppi, a lawyer and former Justice Minister who now represents Memoria Activa, an association of the families of bombing victims.
"Everything has been done so as not to get to the bottom of this matter," Mr. Zuppi said, "and the result is that much time and evidence have been lost."
Questions have been raised in particular about an unusual videotape of a meeting between Judge Galeano and Carlos Alberto Telleldín, a car thief who was jailed shortly after the community center attack because he had briefly owned the van used in the bombing.
The videotape, stolen from Judge Galeano's office and later broadcast on television, shows the two men discussing a $400,000 payment that Mr. Telleldín says he received.
At various times officials have said Judge Galeano and Mr. Telleldín were negotiating a book contract or discussing a reward for information. But in testimony in open court in May, Mr. Telleldín said that "Judge Galeano had promised to free me by October 1997" and to give him the money if he would agree to accuse a group of Buenos Aires Province police officers in the case.
Judge Galeano declined numerous requests for an interview. But Claudio Lifschitz, formerly Judge Galeano's chief investigator, said the judge Galeano had been acting to protect his patrons in the intelligence service, who reported to Mr. Menem, particularly from the testimony of the Iranian defector, Mr. Mesbahi, who was known as Witness C.
"That's why Mr. Galeano has made the testimony of Witness C secret and refuses to allow any follow-up interviews with the Iranian, because that testimony became dangerous the minute it implicated Menem," said Mr. Lifschitz, a lawyer who is the author of a book called "Why the Investigation Was Made to Fail."
"There are another 300 files that he is keeping apart from the main proceeding and that no one but he has access to," Mr. Lifschitz added.
According to Ms. Garré, a former deputy interior minister who is now a member of Congress, 66 cassettes of intercepted telephone conversations disappeared simultaneously from the offices of the Federal Police and intelligence services.
She also said police logbooks had been altered and electronic address books and planners of various suspects erased as part of an official cover-up.
"Not only has there been no support for getting to the bottom of this case, you can also say that some government organs have actively sabotaged the investigation," Ms. Garré said.
"State intelligence and the federal police are clearly involved," she added, "but there is also evidence pointing to the involvement of agencies ranging from Immigration to the Foreign Ministry."
In addition, Judge Galeano appears to have steered away from some areas of inquiry that other investigators think might have yielded useful information.
"If the Iranian track has hardly been looked at," said Ariel Said, the lead investigator of a congressional committee looking into irregularities in the case, "the local Islamic community, which is predominantly Syrian-Lebanese and directly linked to Menem, has been looked at even less."
After more than seven years of delays, a trial finally began here last September and is expected to continue until the end of this year. But of the approximately 20 people who could face long prison terms if convicted, not one is accused of having organized or of having been directly involved in the attack.
Instead all, like Mr. Telleldín, who maintains that he is innocent, are charged in connection with the theft of the van or the alteration of its engine and identifying documents.
Several others are low-level members of the Buenos Aires provincial police, a force that has often been at odds with both the national intelligence service and the Federal Police.
In his testimony in early May, Mr. Telleldín said he had been subjected to "pressures coming directly from the Casa Rosada," the seat of government. Mr. Menem, he contended, sent an emissary in 1995 who offered him a $2 million payment if he would blame a group of Lebanese immigrants then being detained in neighboring Paraguay in conection with the attack.
"Menem was running for re-election, and he wanted to close the circle," Mr. Telleldín said of the visit from a former military officer with close ties to the presidential palace.
Mr. Telleldín said he had also been visited by representatives of the national intelligence agency who urged him to shift some blame to the Buenos Aires provincial police so as to damage Mr. Menem's main rival, Eduardo Duhalde, who was then governor of the province but is now Argentina's president.
Even as the trial and the investigation have dragged on, survivors of the attack and relatives of the victims assemble every Monday morning just before 10 o'clock in front of the main courthouse here.
After a minute of silent prayer, a shofar is blown, speeches honoring the dead are offered and protesters waving placards and photographs of the victims chant, "We demand justice!"
"Argentina has lost an opportunity to contribute to the international body of knowledge about terrorism that could have helped other countries avoid or better confront terrorist actions," Mr. Widder said recently after one such gathering. "What happened here is the model of what not to do in confronting international terrorism, and it leaves the door open to a third attack."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/international/americas/22ARGE.html
Irán sobornó a Menem para que ocultara su implicación en el atentado contra la mutualidad judía
El Gobierno de Teherán pagó 10 millones de dólares al entonces presidente de Argentina, Carlos Saúl Menem, para que encubriera el papel de Irán en el atentado contra la mutualidad judía AMIA en Buenos Aires en 1994, en el que murieron 86 personas. El dato ha sido revelado por un antiguo agente de inteligencia de la República Islámica.
L D (AFP) El testigo, un desertor que fue un agente de alto nivel en los servicios de inteligencia del régimen de los ayatolas, ha dicho en una declaración secreta ante un juzgado argentino que Menem recibió un pago desde una cuenta de un banco suizo controlada por el entonces presidente de Irán, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, según informa The New York Times.
El rotativo estadounidense publica que recibió una copia de la declaración de manos de investigadores argentinos, quienes están frustrados por la falta de progreso en las investigaciones sobre la acción terrorista contra la Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), que dejó 86 muertos y unos 200 heridos. Este atentado ha sido el más sangriento cometido en Iberoamérica y, en el conjunto del continente americano, sólo ha sido superado en número de víctimas por los realizados contra EEUU el 11 de septiembre del año pasado.
Aunque diferentes fuentes señalaron, desde que comenzaron las investigaciones, la vinculación de Irán en el atentado, el Gobierno de Teherán siempre lo ha negado y las autoridades argentinas tardaron muy poco en frenar esa línea de la investigación.
----------------------
Iran Blew Up Jewish Center in Argentina, Defector Says
By LARRY ROHTER
UENOS AIRES, July 21 — The Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing of a Jewish community center here eight years ago that killed 85 people and then paid Argentina's president at the time, Carlos Saúl Menem, $10 million to cover it up, a witness in the case has said in sealed testimony.
A 100-page transcript of a secret deposition, provided to The New York Times by Argentine officials frustrated that the case remains unsolved, supports long-held suspicions of Iranian involvement and adds to the questions surrounding the conduct of an inquiry that has been rife with irregularities from the start.
Evidence has disappeared, leads have been ignored and witnesses have been threatened and apparently bribed.
According to the witness, a high-level defector from Iran's intelligence agency who gave his name as Abdolghassem Mesbahi, Mr. Menem, who was president from 1989 to 1999, benefited for years from his ties to Iranian intelligence officials.
They courted him as a valuable contact, Mr. Mesbahi said, for his combination of rising political power, Muslim ancestry and connections to Argentina's small but influential Syrian-Lebanese community.
Mr. Menem, who is once again a leading candidate for president, has already been tainted by political corruption scandals and spent six months under house arrest last year on charges that he had overseen an illegal arms smuggling operation while in office.
But the bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association on July 18, 1994, the worst terror attack ever carried out here, continues to haunt him and all levels of the Argentine government as a symbol of the absence of accountability that in recent months has brought this country to the brink of collapse.
Through intermediaries, Mr. Menem declined a request for an interview to discuss the case. But Alberto Kohan, his former chief of staff and now an important campaign adviser, suggested that the accusations were politically motivated and denied any official cover-up.
"Every intelligence agency in the world had free passage in Argentina to investigate this case," Mr. Kohan said. "We were completely open. We did everything that the courts asked for. There are people in custody, there is a trial and there is an inquiry under way. We would all like to know who did it. President Menem was totally clear about that at the time."
Iranian officials in Tehran have denied involvement in the bombing. Officials at the Iranian Embassy here declined to discuss the case by telephone and did not respond to a request for comment by fax.
Mr. Mesbahi, the Iranian defector who provided the testimony, met with Argentine investigators in Germany in 1998 and again in Mexico in 2000, speaking at various times in Persian, English, German and French with a Spanish-language translator present.
Argentine officials say that they are not sure of his current whereabouts, except that he remains under Germany's protection, and that they do not know if the name he gave is his real name.
Argentine and German officials describe him as a senior operative who has provided valuable information about Iranian terrorist operations in Europe and Asia through the mid-1990's. He defected to Germany in 1996, reportedly because he was upset at his agency's involvement in the killing of dissident intellectuals in Iran and abroad.
Mr. Mesbahi said the planning for the attack in Buenos Aires began in 1992, led by Mohsen Rabbani, cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and supervised by Hamid Naghashan, a senior official of the Iranian intelligence agency.
One cell focused on "cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack," Mr. Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. "Another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives" in Brazil, he said.
Nilda Garré, who led the Argentine government's antiterrorism unit in 2000 and 2001, and other Argentine officials said Mr. Mesbahi's account had been confirmed by another Iranian who had visited the Argentine Embassy in Tehran twice.
Immigration and Foreign Ministry records here confirm, the officials said, that several Iranians who were said to have been involved in the plot visited Argentina in the months preceding the bomb attack.
Mr. Mesbahi said that after the attack, negotiations took place in Tehran with an emissary, a bearded man of about 50, sent by Mr. Menem. The result was that "$10 million was deposited into a numbered account that Menem had indicated," Mr. Mesbahi said, paid from a $200 million Swiss account controlled by Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Iran's president at the time, and by a son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In return, Mr. Mesbahi said, Mr. Menem agreed to "make declarations that there was no evidence against Iran that it was responsible."
The Menem government initially blamed Iran, but the cumulative effect of later statements, arguing that there was insufficient proof, has been to sow uncertainty about responsibility for the bombing.
Early this year the Swiss government acknowledged that it had been asked to look into information supplied by the Iranian informant. Eamon Mullen, the Argentine government's chief prosecutor in the case, said in an interview that investigators had confirmed that a deposit had been made into an account controlled by Mr. Menem at the bank named by Mr. Mesbahi and in the amount he had specified.
"But it is not known who made the deposit or on what date," Mr. Mullen said, leaving open the possibility that the payment could have been a payoff for other acts of corruption of which Mr. Menem has been accused or from some other source.
After the bombing, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran's supreme leader and still holds that post, publicly expressed his approval.
"By gathering together groups of Jews with records of murder, theft, wickedness and hooliganism from throughout the world," Ayatollah Khamenei said, "the Zionist regime has created an entity under the name of the Israeli nation that only understands the logic of terror and crimes."
In his testimony, Mr. Mesbahi said Iran's contacts with Mr. Menem began in the mid-1980's when he was the governor of La Rioja Province. Because Mr. Menem was of Arab descent and they believed him to share their anti-Jewish sentiments, the Iranians covertly funneled money to Mr. Menem in hopes that he would be elected president and pursue policies favorable to Iran, Mr. Mesbahi said.
"The companies that worked for Menem sold their products at a high price to Iran, which accepted those prices because it knew what those high prices were paying for," Mr. Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. "A lot of money went to the companies that supported the Menem campaign."
After Mr. Menem became president in 1989, he consolidated his power by packing the Supreme Court with close political associates including a former law partner and by placing loyalists in key posts in the national security and intelligence apparatus.
But he enraged the Muslim countries that hoped to take advantage of his rise, which included Libya as well as Syria, where he and his wife at the time both had relatives.
Mr. Menem instead pursued what he called "a carnal relationship" with the United States, apparently yielding to pressure from Washington not to sell weapons or advanced technology to Iran, Libya or Syria, and became the first Argentine head of state to visit Israel.
Argentine officials say the bombing at the Jewish community center was strikingly similar to an attack on the Israeli Embassy here in 1992, in which 28 people died. In both cases a car bomb was used, the targeted building was undergoing repairs and police officers on a security detail inexplicably vanished just before the explosion.
In what he said was a demonstration of his intention to get to the bottom of the Israeli Embassy attack, Mr. Menem put the Argentine Supreme Court in charge of the investigation.
But that inquiry was botched so badly that it now figures in the list of offenses in impeachment proceedings against the justices and, critics say, encouraged the attack two years later on the community center.
"The inaction of the Argentine state, the absolute absence of investigation, showed terrorists that they could act in Argentina without the slightest fear of consequences," Sergio Widder, South American representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview here. He said the inaction had "inspired a level of confidence" that made the attack on the commnity center possible.
After the second attack, Mr. Menem had the cases handed over to an investigative magistrate, Judge Juan José Galeano, rather than the Supreme Court.
But Judge Galeano's conduct of the inquiry, which is continuing, at least on paper, has been so bizarre and brought so much criticism that he is now himself being investigated on charges of improper behavior that could lead to his removal from the bench.
"From the start the Argentine government, especially in the person of Judge Galeano, has never shown a will to investigate and clear up this matter," said Alberto Zuppi, a lawyer and former Justice Minister who now represents Memoria Activa, an association of the families of bombing victims.
"Everything has been done so as not to get to the bottom of this matter," Mr. Zuppi said, "and the result is that much time and evidence have been lost."
Questions have been raised in particular about an unusual videotape of a meeting between Judge Galeano and Carlos Alberto Telleldín, a car thief who was jailed shortly after the community center attack because he had briefly owned the van used in the bombing.
The videotape, stolen from Judge Galeano's office and later broadcast on television, shows the two men discussing a $400,000 payment that Mr. Telleldín says he received.
At various times officials have said Judge Galeano and Mr. Telleldín were negotiating a book contract or discussing a reward for information. But in testimony in open court in May, Mr. Telleldín said that "Judge Galeano had promised to free me by October 1997" and to give him the money if he would agree to accuse a group of Buenos Aires Province police officers in the case.
Judge Galeano declined numerous requests for an interview. But Claudio Lifschitz, formerly Judge Galeano's chief investigator, said the judge Galeano had been acting to protect his patrons in the intelligence service, who reported to Mr. Menem, particularly from the testimony of the Iranian defector, Mr. Mesbahi, who was known as Witness C.
"That's why Mr. Galeano has made the testimony of Witness C secret and refuses to allow any follow-up interviews with the Iranian, because that testimony became dangerous the minute it implicated Menem," said Mr. Lifschitz, a lawyer who is the author of a book called "Why the Investigation Was Made to Fail."
"There are another 300 files that he is keeping apart from the main proceeding and that no one but he has access to," Mr. Lifschitz added.
According to Ms. Garré, a former deputy interior minister who is now a member of Congress, 66 cassettes of intercepted telephone conversations disappeared simultaneously from the offices of the Federal Police and intelligence services.
She also said police logbooks had been altered and electronic address books and planners of various suspects erased as part of an official cover-up.
"Not only has there been no support for getting to the bottom of this case, you can also say that some government organs have actively sabotaged the investigation," Ms. Garré said.
"State intelligence and the federal police are clearly involved," she added, "but there is also evidence pointing to the involvement of agencies ranging from Immigration to the Foreign Ministry."
In addition, Judge Galeano appears to have steered away from some areas of inquiry that other investigators think might have yielded useful information.
"If the Iranian track has hardly been looked at," said Ariel Said, the lead investigator of a congressional committee looking into irregularities in the case, "the local Islamic community, which is predominantly Syrian-Lebanese and directly linked to Menem, has been looked at even less."
After more than seven years of delays, a trial finally began here last September and is expected to continue until the end of this year. But of the approximately 20 people who could face long prison terms if convicted, not one is accused of having organized or of having been directly involved in the attack.
Instead all, like Mr. Telleldín, who maintains that he is innocent, are charged in connection with the theft of the van or the alteration of its engine and identifying documents.
Several others are low-level members of the Buenos Aires provincial police, a force that has often been at odds with both the national intelligence service and the Federal Police.
In his testimony in early May, Mr. Telleldín said he had been subjected to "pressures coming directly from the Casa Rosada," the seat of government. Mr. Menem, he contended, sent an emissary in 1995 who offered him a $2 million payment if he would blame a group of Lebanese immigrants then being detained in neighboring Paraguay in conection with the attack.
"Menem was running for re-election, and he wanted to close the circle," Mr. Telleldín said of the visit from a former military officer with close ties to the presidential palace.
Mr. Telleldín said he had also been visited by representatives of the national intelligence agency who urged him to shift some blame to the Buenos Aires provincial police so as to damage Mr. Menem's main rival, Eduardo Duhalde, who was then governor of the province but is now Argentina's president.
Even as the trial and the investigation have dragged on, survivors of the attack and relatives of the victims assemble every Monday morning just before 10 o'clock in front of the main courthouse here.
After a minute of silent prayer, a shofar is blown, speeches honoring the dead are offered and protesters waving placards and photographs of the victims chant, "We demand justice!"
"Argentina has lost an opportunity to contribute to the international body of knowledge about terrorism that could have helped other countries avoid or better confront terrorist actions," Mr. Widder said recently after one such gathering. "What happened here is the model of what not to do in confronting international terrorism, and it leaves the door open to a third attack."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/international/americas/22ARGE.html