Al-Qaeda and Argentina

Jane's Security ^ | 10/26/2001

[Pokey78]

One of the more bizarre tangents of the 11 September suicide attacks on the USA is a report that purports to link Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network to two deadly bombings in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 that killed 177 people and which remain unsolved.

Argentine, US and Israeli authorities have repeatedly blamed those attacks on Hizbullah and Iran, but no one has ever been charged, let alone convicted, for them. On 18 October, however, Argentina’s foreign ministry made the disclosure that its embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, received telephone calls — purportedly from Al-Qaeda — on 20, 23 and 24 September 2000 warning that an attack on a US target was planned for 26 September of that year and claiming responsibility for an unspecified ‘explosion’ in Argentina. As far as is known, no US facility was attacked on 26 September 2000, but the US naval destroyer USS Cole was hit by suicide bombers in Aden harbour on 12 October that year, killing 17 American service personnel.

It remains unclear to which of the Buenos Aires bombings the callers to the Riyadh embassy were referring, although Argentinian judicial sources believe that it was the 18 July 1994 attack on the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community centre in which 85 people were killed and 300 wounded. An earlier attack on the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital had been carried out on 17 March 1992, killing 92 and wounding 200.

. . .

The Mughniyeh connection

Tehran and Hizbullah have both denied that they were involved in the Buenos Aires bombing. However, in September 1999, Argentinian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Imad Fayez Mughniyeh (alias ‘Hajji’), a top Hizbullah security official in the 1980s and alleged leader of a sub-group called Islamic Jihad, in connection with the 1992 embassy bombing. He was later indicted for the AMIA atrocity as well.

Mughniyeh, a Lebanese Shi‘a Muslim, was indicted by the US in 1985 for the hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed. He is also suspected of being behind a whole host of other attacks in the 1980s, including the kidnapping and murder of CIA station chief William Buckley in Beruit in 1984, as well as suicide bombings of the US embassy and a US marine barracks in which some 300 people perished. Mughniyeh and some of his associates were named in the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list after the events of 11 September. His present whereabouts are unknown, although he is said to have undergone extensive plastic surgery to disguise his appearance.

Whether hard evidence of a direct link between Mughniyeh and Bin Laden will eventually be revealed remains unclear, although there has been speculation that he might have played a key role in the planning of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Perhaps those mysterious calls to the Argentinian Embassy in Saudi Arabia back in 2000 offer a tantalising clue.

[weikel]

the bombing of a neutral catholic country proves that american policies r not the cause