Argentina will put out an Interpol red alert on a man alleged to be Hezbollah’s leader in South America and accused of planning the 1994 Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) bombing in Buenos Aires, its defence minister said on Friday.
In addition to the AMIA bombing, which left 85 people dead, Hussein Ahmad Karaki is also accused of being behind the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing, in which 29 people were killed, Patricia Bullrich said on Friday.
“We are going to ask for [an Interpol] red alert for this criminal who is currently in Lebanon,” Bullrich said at a press conference, according to the Buenos Aires Herald. Karaki was also responsible for “at least three attempted attacks in Peru, Bolivia and Brazil in recent years,” she said.
Karaki is Hezbollah’s main officer in Latin America, according to the defence minister. He has evaded authorities in multiple Latin American countries by using aliases, sometimes thanks to help from Venezuela’s far-left dictatorship, she added.
Hezbollah has turned some Brazilian drug cartels, including Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho, into narco-terrorist organisations, she said.
Argentine President Javier Milei said in July that he would submit a bill to try in absentia the Iranian suspects in the AMIA bombing.
Milei, a vocal supporter of Israel, succeeded last year Alberto Fernández of the former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s centre-left Justicialist Party.
In 2021, an Argentine court dismissed a lawsuit against de Kirchner over her 2013 agreement with Tehran, in which she committed the Argentine authorities to investigate the bombing together with the Islamic Republic. Decried as a major miscarriage and mockery of justice, the agreement “did not constitute a crime,” the court ruled.
De Kirchner was accused of using the agreement to cover up Iranian involvement in the attack, which she has denied.
In a television interview last week about issues unrelated to Hezbollah and Iran, Milei said he would like to put “the final nail in the coffin of Kirchnerism, with Cristina inside”.
