IRAN - July 23 - Defector Says Tehran Blew Up Jewish Centre In Argentina.

A report in The FT says: "The Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing of a Jewish community center [in Buenos Aires] eight years ago that killed 85 people, then paid Argentina's president at the time, Carlos Saul Menem, $10 million to cover it up". (The bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association on July 18, 1994, was the worst terror attack ever carried out in Argentina). The report is based on a sealed testimony of a high-level defector from the intelligence agency who gave his name as Abdolghassem Mesbahi. Mesbahi said the planning for the attack in Buenos Aires began in 1992, led by Mohsen Rabbani, cultural attache at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and supervised by Hamid Naghashan, a senior official of the Iranian intelligence agency. One cell focused on "co-operating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack. Another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives", which came from Brazil. According to Mesbahi, Menem, Argentinean president from 1989 to 1999, benefited for years from his ties to Tehran intelligence officials. They courted Menem as a valuable contact, Mesbahi said, for his combination of rising political power, Muslim ancestry and connections to Argentina's small but influential Syrian-Lebanese community. Officials in Tehran denied involvement in the bombing. Officials at the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires declined to discuss the case by telephone and did not respond to a faxed request for comment. (Mesbahi, the Iranian defector, met with Argentine investigators in Germany in 1998 and again in Mexico in 2000. Argentine and German officials describe him as an operative who provided valuable information about Iranian terrorist operations in Europe and Asia in the mid-1990s. He defected to Germany in 1996). Nilda Garre, who led the Argentine government's anti-terrorism unit in 2000 and 2001, and other Argentine officials said Mesbahi's account was confirmed by another Iranian who had visited the Argentine Embassy in Tehran twice.