IRAN - March 9 - Four Govt. Officials Indicted In '94 Bombing.

Argentinean judge Juan Jose Galeano orders arrest warrants for four government officials who he says helped organise and carry out the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that left 85 people dead. (The 400-page ruling is the first time that Argentina has formally accused Tehran of involvement in the blast that occurred on July 18, 1994, and was the deadliest single anti-Semitic incident since World War II). But Galeano balks at a recommendation by prosecutors that more than a dozen more senior Tehran officials, including Supreme Leader Ayat. Khamen'i also be indicted. The highest-ranking official named by Galeano is former minister of security and intelligence Ali Fallahian. Mohsen Rabbani, a cultural attache in the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s, is named in the indictment as operational director of the attack. The other two officials indicted are Ali Balesh Abadi, a diplomatic courier; and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, a former education minister and a former deputy speaker of the Majlis. None of the men is in Argentina, and the indictment is accompanied by a request that Interpol apprehend the four officials. But the likelihood that they will be arrested, unless they travel outside the Islamic Republic under their own names, is remote. Galeano also cites evidence from the Argentinean intelligence agency that "armed units of the pro-Iranian armed group Hizbollah" were involved, though no Hizbollah member is named in the indictment. The indictment drew an angry reaction from Tehran, where Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said: "No evidence of Iranian involvement has been provided". He dismissed the charges as a fabrication "made up by Zionist circles" in Israel and the US. To a large extent, the accusations echo those contained in secret testimony offered to Argentina by Abolghassem Mesbahi, a former high-ranking Iranian intelligence official who defected to Germany in 1996. According to a transcript of the testimony he offered in 1998 and 2000, he said that senior government officials - including Khamen'i and Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was then the president - personally ordered, organised and financed the attack on the Jewish centre, the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association.