More than three years after they set out to find the terrorists who reduced the Jewish community center to rubble, investigators may instead have bagged an unintended quarry: corrupt officers of the deeply troubled Buenos Aires provincial police force.
In trying to unravel the bombing that killed 86 people, investigators discovered last week that a high-ranking former officer who ran the provincial police force’s car theft unit and a chain of used-car lots received $2.5 million the week before the bombing.
That officer’s boss admitted his top lieutenant was a “criminal” and probably had helped the bombers in exchange for cash and perhaps out of anti-Semitic leanings.
Pedro Klodczyk, the retired chief who amassed a fortune from a bolt-making factory thought to be a money-laundering front, said he had no control over corruption running rampant in his department.
Just what role police wrongdoing played in a bombing that has been attributed to Middle East extremists remains unproven. What is clear is that a long-stalled terror investigation is at last bearing unexpected fruit.
“What was found was the first material proof of the level of corruption in the Buenos Aires police,” said Sergio Kiernan, editor of Tiempos del Mundo, a Buenos Aires daily.
Now, however, “the two issues–local corruption and foreign terrorism–have gotten intertwined,” he said. “We don’t know where one ends and the other starts.”
At the heart of the investigation is a document showing that Juan Jose Ribelli, a former provincial police inspector charged last year in the bombing, received $2.5 million just a week before the July 18, 1994, explosion.
Ribelli insists the money was a gift from his father, a 90-year-old retired railway worker. He has not been able to adequately explain how his father, who lives on a pension, came into such a fortune.
Members of a congressional commission looking into the bombing say they have proof Ribelli was in the Paraguyan city of Ciudad del Este, a major smuggling center and South American focus for Middle East terrorists, a day before he signed papers accepting the $2.5 million in cash from his father.
“We don’t know this money is directly related to the bombing,” said Juan Pablo Cafiero, a member of the congressional commission, “but there are a lot of coincidences.”
Ribelli, investigators say, took a room in the same hotel used by an Israeli rescue team just after the bombing and was photographed during a raid on a group of conservative former soldiers in Argentina known as the carapintadas, or painted faces for the camouflage paint they wore during revolts against the democratic government in the 1980s.
One member of the group showed up at the bomb site moments after the explosion, investigators say, and the group’s leaders include Congressman Emilion Morello, who received a $500,000 campaign contribution from the Iranian Embassy in Uruguay and has written letters on Iran’s behalf.
Morello, who is expected to testify Wednesday before Congress, “certainly has a very close relationship with Iran, though not necessarily with the bombing,” Cafiero said.
The congressman has insisted he is innocent of any connection with the bombing. “I’ve got nothing to do with it. I don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said Monday night on a Buenos Aires television program. “It’s crazy. I don’t know any Iranians.”
Investigators aren’t quite sure how the pieces fit together, though they say evidence of substantial local involvement in the bombing is mounting and that Ribelli and four other former police officers now in jail have clear ties to a used van that ended up packed with explosives in front of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association Center.
“Ribelli’s part in this attack is much more important than we thought at the beginning,” said Alberto Zuppi, a lawyer for families of the bombing victims.
But “logically, this bombing is bigger than Ribelli,” Cafiero said.
Investigators have made little progress tracking down the crime’s presumed foreign connection. Informers over the last three years have tied the crime to Iranian terrorists, and six Iranian diplomats in Buenos Aires were shuffled back to Iran just before and after the bombing, Zuppi said.
This week, the judge in the case is reinterviewing Manouchehr Motamer, an Iranian informer who identified the Iranian diplomats allegedly tied to the bombing and who now lives in a witness-protection program in California.
“The participation of Iran in the bombing is very clear,” Zuppi said, citing more than 140,000 pages of testimony gathered in the case. Diplomatic immunity, however, might prevent suspects from being extradited and questioned.
Iran has denied any involvement in the bombing, and Guido Di Tella, Argentina’s foreign minister, said his country would take action against Iran only if it found “very solid and unquestionable proof.”
Sergio Widder, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Buenos Aires, credits President Clinton’s meeting in October with surviving family members of the Jewish center blast with helping to spur the new breaks in the case. Buenos Aires has the largest Jewish community in Latin America.
But Widder said he remains “not very optimistic” about finding enough hard proof to produce convictions.
A second bombing, of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, also remains unsolved. That blast killed 29 people.
At the site of the center bombing, on a narrow street in the Once neighborhood, a new Jewish center is rising. Israeli-trained plainclothes police stroll across the street, radios in hand. A sign on the construction entrance reads, “Remember the Pain that Never Ends.”
Survivors of the blast, who gather each Monday with family members of the dead in front of Argentina’s Congress building to press for action, say they are encouraged by the recent progress in the investigation.
“I feel hope that at least it’s moving,” said Rosa Barreiros, 36, who lost her 5-year-old son, Sebastian, in the blast, which tore through the building as she was walking by. She has had 13 operations to repair a shattered right arm, the most recent this month, and deep scars run up her deformed hand.
Corrupt Buenos Aires police officers,”I think, are one part of the chain,” she said.
Widder said he and others are not surprised by the possibility that the 47,000-member provincial police force, known for its arrogant corruption and violence, played a role in the bombing.
“This was just one more job for these criminals,” he said.
