According to a Wednesday article by investigative journalist Gareth Porter at Inter Press Service News Agency, the full text of the 2006 arrest warrant for Iranian officials by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman reveals that the whole indictment was based on MKO allegations that the decision for the attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building was made at a high-level meeting of Iranian officials in August 1993.
The 900-page arrest warrant, recently made available in English for the first time, merely relies on the statements of four members of MKO’s political arm, the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), namely Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the Security and Intelligence Committee of the NCRI; Hadi Roshanravani, a member of the International Affairs Committee of the NCRI; as well as Ali Reza Ahmadi and Hamid Reza Eshagi, two NCRI affiliates identified as “defectors.”
Nisman’s warrant makes 61 references to the testimonies of the four MKO members, citing Kouchaksaraee 29 times, Roshanravani 16 times and Ahmadi and Eshagi 16 times. "Nisman does not cite any non-MEK source as claiming such a meeting took place," Porter says.
Nisman’s indictment neither provides any evidence to corroborate the claims, nor gives any reason to prove that the MKO members were in a position to be aware of such a high-level Iranian meeting.
The MKO - which the US removed from the list of its terrorist organizations last year- fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it enjoyed the support of Iraq's executed dictator Saddam Hussein, and set up its camp near the Iranian border.
The group is notorious for carrying out numerous terrorist acts against Iranian civilians and officials, involvement in the bloody repression of the 1991 Shia Muslims in southern Iraq, and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in the country's north under Saddam.
“Nisman’s readiness to base the crucial accusation against Iran in the AMIA case solely on MEK (another abbreviation for MKO) sources and his denial of their obvious unreliability highlights the fact that he has been playing a political role on behalf of certain powerful interests rather than uncovering the facts,” Porter pointed out.
Tehran and Buenos Aires signed a memorandum of understanding in January to jointly probe the AMIA bombing, which killed 85 people and wounded 300 others.
Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has vowed that her administration “would not allow the AMIA tragedy to be used as a chess piece in the game of faraway geopolitical interests.”
Under intense political pressure from the US and Israel, Argentina had previously accused Iran of having carried out the bomb attack on AMIA. The Islamic Republic has categorically denied any involvement in the terrorist bombing.
In July, Washington reacted fiercely when Argentina prevented Nisman from taking part in a US Congress meeting to level allegations against Iran.
Nisman had collected a 500-page indictment in which he accused the Islamic Republic of “infiltrating” regional countries to spread an “intelligence network.”
