Insight The Killers of the AMIA Still Walk Free

On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 am, a Hezbollah suicide bomber, Ibrahim Berro, drove a car laden with explosives in front of the AMIA, the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, and pressed the detonator, ripping the edifice apart, killing 85 people and wounding more than 200. The regime in Iran ordered the terror attack, and Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy in Lebanon, took it upon itself to execute it.

Today, Argentina marked the 30th anniversary of the AMIA bombing. All the perpetrators are still alive, except for Berro and Hezbollah’s senior commander, Imad Moughniyeh, who died in a car bombing in Damascus in 2008. The wily paymasters in Tehran who ordered the attack will no doubt continue to shield from justice the handful of their senior colleagues hit by international arrest warrants and Interpol red notices.

But what of the lesser known, yet no less lethal, Hezbollah subordinates who, back in the early 1990s, spent months in Brazil and Argentina, working every detail of the elaborate plot to murder Jews in the heart of Buenos Aires? They still walk free. And many of them never even left Latin America, having mostly been ignored by the very authorities who should have jailed them long ago. As Argentina remembers its dead, it is not too late to trace back the steps of the assassins and renew the case for their arrest.

Consider, for example, the last hours in the life of Berro.

According to two 2022 declassified Mossad reports, whose accuracy has never been questioned, Berro landed in São Paulo, Brazil, only two days before the attack. To make his way to Buenos Aires, he had to rely on several local operatives. One was Brazilian-born Khaled Mohamad Kazem Kassem, who was in Brazil working undercover for a Hezbollah front company. Kassem picked Berro up at the airport and took him to the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, or TBA, where two other Hezbollah operatives, brothers Fouad and Abdallah Ismail Tormos, hosted him overnight before smuggling him across the border into Argentina.

Kassem, who played a key role in the attack’s planning stages, later rose through Hezbollah’s ranks, becoming the second-in-command of the group’s unit in charge of planning terror attacks. He is presumed to be in Lebanon, but his siblings and mother live in São Paulo. The Tormos siblings have also moved on, as if nothing happened. One is still in Paraguay, and the other lives in England. As for the now-defunct front company that gave Kassem his cover, its former co-owners are still in Brazil. Thirty years later, they both run a business in São Paulo, have built families, and in one case helped siblings migrate to Brazil.

None of these people paid any price. Nobody bothered them. In fact, they seemed to have thrived.

Even more shocking is that much about their identities and roles in the plot is public knowledge, thanks both to the investigation that the late Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman conducted prior to his murder in 2015 and, more recently, to the declassified Mossad reports published in 2022.

You’d think these people, named in the voluminous documents of criminal investigations and intelligence reports, would have left the scene of the crime long ago and left the thinnest of paper trails.

You’d expect them to live as fugitives, leading a shadowy existence, sheltering in hospitable lands where their crime is praised as heroic, not decried as a mortal sin.

You’d think that if they were still living in Brazil, where they plotted a mass atrocity, local authorities would take action, not let them roam free.

Yet a few perfunctory searches in publicly available documents reveal that they never worried too much about the consequences of their actions. They are unencumbered by their past, left alone by the powers that be.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that Iran, at long last, will turn in the plot’s leaders to Argentina’s justice system for prosecution. But that is no excuse to leave alone all others, especially those who, if there were any political will, could easily be turned over to Argentina for further investigation.

Argentinian authorities, accompanied by Jewish leaders and foreign dignitaries, are gathering today to remember the victims and renew their annual request for justice. It is time to heed it.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Emanuele and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Emanuele on X @eottolenghi. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.