Iran’s new crop of political leaders includes two individuals wanted by international law enforcement authorities for their roles in the 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, in which 85 people lost their lives and more than 300 were badly wounded.
Both men — Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi and Vice-President for Economic Affairs Mohsen Rezaei — were among the cabinet nominees of newly-installed hardline President Ebrahim Raisi who were approved on Wednesday by the regime’s consultative assembly, the Majlis.
Vahidi and Rezaei were the subjects of two of the six “red notices” issued in 2007 by Interpol, the international law enforcement agency, for the Iranian and Hezbollah operatives sought in connection with the AMIA atrocity. No person has ever been convicted in connection with the bombing, which has been the subject of a series of judicial and political scandals in Argentina, including an initial sham trial that resulted in the impeachment of the presiding judge in 2005, and the unsolved murder in 2015 of Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor appointed a decade earlier to take over the AMIA investigation, whose efforts led to Interpol issuing its red notices for the main executors of the attack.
A veteran of the 1979 Islamist revolution, Vahidi is returning to the Defense Ministry for the second time in his career, having served in the Minister’s post between 2009-13 under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rezaei, meanwhile, served as commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) between 1980 and 1997, a period that witnessed the bloody eight-year war between the Islamic Republic and the Ba’athist regime in neighboring Iraq.
Toby Dershowitz, a Washington, DC-based analyst who has written extensively on the AMIA case, told The Algemeiner that the appointments of Vahidi and Rezaei signaled Iran’s determination to “normalize mass murder.”
Source: Algmeiner
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