The entire building collapsed like a sand castle damaged by the sea. 30 years ago, it was 14.50 on Tuesday, December 17, 1992. The Israeli embassies and consulates in Arroyo 910 and 916 no longer existed.
The devastating outbreak was followed by a deep silence following a catastrophe due to the cries of the wounded, the requests for help and the running of those who wanted to help. This explosion, which was not yet known exactly what happened, also affected the school of Josefa Capdevila de Gutiérrez, a garden integrated into the parish of Mater Admirabilis and the school, where 92 hundred children between 3 and 5 years old were about to leave. Adults, and at least one An elderly family where people died at the residence of San Francisco.
Seven years later, since the 1999 attack affected other countries, the Supreme Court, who was in charge of the investigation, established “the importance of the facts” and explained it in the following terms: “(...) On March 17, 1992, at 14:47pm, a Ford F 100 station wagon, Domain C 1,275,871, passed through Arroyo Street in this federal capital, and climbed onto the sidewalk with two right wheels in front of 916 of the aforementioned artery. The headquarters of the State Consulate in Israel- immediately caused a significant explosion. The incident occurred a few minutes after the internal security of the diplomatic headquarters concluded one of the general rounds, and when police personnel responsible for external custody of the diplomatic headquarters were absent as an additional service. The origin of the explosion was an explosive war consisting of a mixture of pentaerythrite tetranitrate-PETN, pentrite and trinitrotoluene-TNT, and trotyl- at a rate estimated at 50-50%, located at the rear right of the vehicle.”
The court also proved that this attack was the work bof Islamic jihad, the armed wing of Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian political party active in Lebanon. The culprit was not found or attempted. In 2010, Israeli ambassador Daniel Gazit revealed that his country's intelligence agency Mossad conducted an investigation into the attack, the results of which were not known, and Israel had eliminated the perpetrators.
However, in a few seconds after the attack, everything was nothing.The stories of the victims, survivors, and witnesses are still alive, despite the years passed. Ambassador Itzhak Shefie saved his life by a miracle He left the embassy a few minutes before the outbreak. At that time, Consul Dani Carmon was forty-one years old that afternoon.He lived in Buenos Aires with his wife, Eliora, who worked at the embassy, and five children.Several years ago, he recalled that morning of the attack: “It was a normal day, autumn was about to begin, it was a very sweet day, and it was one of those days that only Buenos Aires usually offers. We had a plan that included dinner for 25 people at home with important visitors from Israel.”
The embassy was under renovation, and Carmon, together with architect Gabriel Picson, reviewed the account and quality of the coating. “I don't even remember that there was a sudden boom. What I heard was a thunderous silence as the rubble fell, and there was no sound. Then, after a few minutes, I heard people running. Fanny, the chief accountant of the embassy, took me outside, and if it weren't for that meeting, we would have been elsewhere in the embassy. No one survived the explosion. Another memory was lying in a van and taking me to the hospital.”
Carmon woke up in a hospital bed a few days later. Visited him in front of two colleagues and told him that his wife died in the attack. They also asked if they would talk directly to their children, and Carmon said yes. “My children have grown up, started a family and think about everything lost by those who are no longer with us,” the diplomat was the Ambassador of India to Israel and will return to Argentina every five years with his family to attend today's celebrations. “Because here we left something behind and came to find it again.”
At the time of the outbreak, Lea Kovensky was drinking coffee at the embassy switch with the telephone operator Mirtha, a specialist in dealing with tall armatoste, which was plugged in and pulled to pass communications. The armatoste would save her life. “The explosion was a sharp blow, and we were all wrapped in a cloud of white powder. The waves threw me back.I started screaming.” Leah was 36 years old at the time and was secretary of the military deputy of the embassy. A crystal that flew like a sharp knife hurt his face and stuck to his head.He was able to go out into the corner of Arroyo and Suipacha between an inert body and a cry of pain. With a bloody face, he won the street and did not know what to do in front of a floor full of broken glass.Suddenly she felt a pair of arms lifted her up and held her towards Suipacha, and her face created a delta of blood.
He was held in the arms of Bruce Willison, Jr. of the United States Marine Corps, 24, who was on a diplomatic custody mission in a Latin American country: I received Argentina in March, and on Tuesday the 17th I drank coffee in a bar near the embassy. When he heard the explosion, he found Lea, who acted reflexively, rushed to Arroyo and lifted to Suipacha at the age of 800, where the wounded began to arrive. Many of them were stretchers with improvised stretchers whose doors were torn due to the explosion, and with supporting doormen in buildings near the embassy. Later, the young soldier tried to rescue more people, practice a tourniquet, and close open wounds until they were evicted by police and civil defense.
The scenes of the oceans and secretaries are historical because Bruce and Leah met outstanding photo journalists in the race for salvation. Oscar Mosteyrin, who died in 2014, was 53 years old at the time. He was a notable photographer and probably the expert who knew best how to “read” a car race, F1, or Turismo Carretera. If there was a great photo, it was an Oscar. At the time of the outbreak, Mosteirín was far away from circuits and pits. He photographed Colonel Juan Jamie Cecio in San Martín Square and Colonel Juan Jamie Cesio in the magazine “Gente”. Cesio, who was persecuted and imprisoned during the last dictatorship, was the political unit of Lieutenant General Jorge Raúl Carcano, who was restored until Juan Perón turned the wind in December at the time of the explosion. At the time of the explosion, Mosteirín was the chief political unit of Lieutenant General of Lieutenant General Jorge Raúl Carcano. After grabbing the gesture of surprise of the spirit, the thick pearlescent smoke that fell less than 200 meters, pointed at the lens, activated the camera again and went straight to the embassy I ran. He met Bruce and Leah. His photographs are also history.
The investigation into the attack remained in the hands of the Supreme Court. At that time, the incumbent Ricardo Levene (Ricardo Levene) arrived at Arroyo Street at 4:30 p.m. with her legal secretary Sylvina Katucci. At that time, the version was increased as was customary in Argentina. They talked about bankruptcy at the embassy where they kept explosives and protected the shooting gallery. A similar claim, the claim of rupture, will be repeated attacks that demolished the AMIA two years later.
Another rumor claimed that there were no car bombs and that explosives entered the embassy with spare parts hidden in bags and materials entering and leaving the court every day.More than a rumor, it was an initial paper held by the Federal Police. The case was taken over from nearby 15 constituencies. The certainty of the car bomb was only seen at midnight on Tuesday. A crater was found between the sidewalk and the embassy building line, which until then was covered with rubble and filled with water.
Levene appointed a person who was “born and raised” as an investigator in the judiciary, and Alfredo Bisordi, the criminal secretary of the court, complained that the police had first notified the Minister of Interior, José Luis Manzano, who met with the Security Council, and asked for exact details about the entry and exit of the country, as evidenced by an AMIA investigation two years after crossing the border.
When Manzano arrived at Arroyo Street a few hours later, he told me that it was Ford Fairlane where a car bomb entered Arroyo from Suipacha in the wrong way. It was a version of SIDE taken from the street. The minister was struggling. He took office on August 12, 1991, and 12 days later, a gang consisting of members of the Federal Police and officers kidnapped Mauricio Macri, who was the sole director of his father's business group at the time. Manzano followed the practical advice of Enrique Nosiglia, which contributed decisively to the saving of Macri's life.And seven months after the episode, an attack on the Israeli embassy occurred. However, Manzano was in the embassy's parking block. It can be argued that the fragments of the vehicle that became showed that there was a machine gun fire before the attack No, it was ridiculous.
President Carlos Menem was not too far away and spoke about the author of the attack: “They were a fundamentalist sector that was defeated by the remnants of Nazism and the country.” They asked him if he was talking about a painted face, and he said yes. It was another nonsense.
And in the dance, which was the cornerstone of future research, there was another nonsense. Experts did not agree: the police and the gendarmerie differed in the explosives used for the explosion. It was a pentrite for the Commonwealth, and hexogen for the gendarmerie. This discrepancy between science and practice, with a tendency towards accuracy, can be seen later in attacks on AMIA and the still mysterious death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
Based on this, studies were built that suffered from apathy, neglect, apathy, and anomalies. For at least 10 years, the death toll was thought to be twenty-nine until it was fixed at twenty-two. Partly because several corpses or human remains were not sent to the judicial body depository in a bag. In 1999, seven years after the attack, the court recognized: “On the other hand, various human remains were found at the scene of the incident, and various forensic examinations, doctors and other analyses were carried out with the aim of identifying them, some of which are currently under full development, and also aim to confirm the identity of suicide drivers.” Identification did not occur.
The decision to send the bodies of Israeli diplomats, soldiers and employees who died in the attack to Israel, and in some cases helped the confusion without an autopsy. In 1999, the court partially corrected the confusion and recognized: “(...) The following explanation could be made for the five deaths without a necrosis number in the preceding paragraph: The body of the living Albarracín de Lescano, who died while living in a San Francisco home, was delivered directly to the deceased family at the judicial police station on the scene. The deaths recognized by Ben Rafael and Eli Carmon, recognized by David Araj and Batia Eldad (José E Ginsburg), entered the judicial morgue, but for religious and humanitarian reasons, no dissection of the corpse was carried out, and repatriation to the state of Israel was subsequently approved. The lifeless corpses of Ellowson, recognized by her husband and the head of the AMIA store, were removed by their respective relatives in the morgue of the hospital where they were hospitalized. The term to the country was also repatriated.”
The responsibility that the court attributed to the Islamic jihad was also maintained by the Islamic jihad, which eventually claimed the attack. The court then ordered the international occupation of Imad Mughniyah, the head of Jihad at the time of the attack, and was responsible for the central and external security of Hezbollah. However, it was discovered that Mughniyah died in the attack in Syria and that the order should be lifted. Over the years, there were more suspects, more indictments, more arrest warrants than ever before, and the latter by Interpol more than ever.
In 2015, Ricardo Lorenzetti, then head of the court, stated that the decision issued by the court in 1999 was “res judicata.” It wasn't. This sentence was intended to define responsibility and was acquitted of an Iranian woman who was falsely associated with the attack. The ruling signed by Judge Enrique Petraki, Elena Highton Denolasco, Carlos Fayt, Juan Carlos Makeda, Raúl Zaparoni, Carmen Argibey, Lorenzetti himself (together with Judge Maqueda, who is still the only one who constitutes the court), provided not one thing, but an investigation.It is necessary to proceed according to the elements found. The attack was the work of an Islamic jihad, the armed arm of Hezbollah, and it is that it was carried out by Ford F-100, which was purchased from a police photographer by a person who exhibited the document in the name of a Brazilian citizen. Elias Gribeiro da Luz. The court even presented some interesting facts about the purchase and sale of the van. According to the seller's testimony, when he asked the buyer to copy the documents, “(...) Da Luz, who was already in the car, jokingly promised that he would deliver it the next day, and after that he quickly boarded the vehicle so as not to return and took the card at the same time. Commercial business”.
By the way, the document was false and the investigation never knew and did not know who Da Luz was. He did not know and did not know where the van was parked since it was purchased by Riddles and Brazilians until March 17, February 24, 1992, the day of the attack. The investigation by the court did not know and did not know who and in what way cooperated in the country with Hezbollah terrorists in logistics and subsequent reports of attacks on the embassy.
The Embassy of Israel operates today on the 10th floor of the La Buenos Aires Tower in Avenida de Mayo. This place, which stood until 1992, is today a memory square. A part of the original wall has been preserved, the names of the victims are engraved on the plaque, and two rows of trees grow for a broken life. Like every March 17, an event full of emotion will be held today.
30, it is also an anniversary of embarrassing frustration.
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