Former Argentine President Charged With Jewish Center Bombing Cover-Up

Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner Image by Getty Images
BUENOS AIRES (JTA) — An Argentinean judge ordered the arrest of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner for treason and covering up the alleged involvement of senior Iranian officials in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center.
Judge Claudio Bonadio ordered Kirchner’s arrest on Thursday and asked the Argentinean Senate to strip her of her parliamentary immunity, clearing the way for her arrest and trial.
Bonadio’s order also targeted other Argentinean officials in the effort to cover up Iran’s involvement in the attack, including former Foreign Minister Hector Timmerman, who is Jewish and is currently under house arrest.
Kirchner’s former legal secretary Carlos Zannini, Muslim community leader Jorge Alejandro Khalil and pro-Iranian activists Luis D’Elía and Fernando Esteche were all arrested in raids on Thursday morning.
In his 491-page ruling, Bonadio wrote that the 1994 attack on the AMIA center, which killed 85 people and left more than 150 injured, and a 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, were “acts of war” by Iran against Argentina. A memorandum that Kirchner had signed with Iran to jointly investigate the attacks appeared to achieve Iran’s goal of avoiding being declared a terrorist state, the judge wrote.
The arrest warrant against the former government officials is based on a 2015 accusation made by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor charged with investigating Iran’s alleged role in the AMIA bombing. Nisman was found dead in his apartment in 2015, the day before he was scheduled to present his allegations to the Argentinean Congress.
“Finally justice is advancing and all we can confirm now is that what Nisman said had a substance,” Ariel Cohen Sabban, the president of Argentina’s Jewish umbrella group DAIA, told reporters on Thursday.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Make a Passover Gift Today!
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Ben Shapiro, Emily Damari among torch lighters for Israel’s Independence Day ceremony
-
Fast Forward Larry David’s ‘My Dinner with Adolf’ essay skewers Bill Maher’s meeting with Trump
-
Sports Israeli mom ‘made it easy’ for new NHL player to make history
-
Communications The Forward Announces Gifts of Domains Yiddish.com and Yiddish.org by Elie Hirschfeld and his wife Sarah Hirschfeld, MD
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.