The Iranian Foreign Ministry in a statement deplored the Zionist regime as the main supporter of state-sponsored terrorism, saying that the Israeli officials have many times admitted this crime.

The statement came after two former ambassadors of the racist Zionist regime argued that most of the people involved in the AMIA Jewish Center in Argentina have been assassinated by the Tel Aviv regime.

“Such comments are clear confessions to state-sponsored terrorism and need to be condemned by civilized and peace-loving governments and nations,” Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham said.

She added that such comments also indicate that the Zionist regime had from the very beginning been well aware about the identity of the agents who committed that crime and has systematically tried to omit them physically, so that their identities and the realities about the crime would remain concealed for good.

“If the Zionist regime, as it claims, was aware of the identity of those individuals, why had it kept information secret thus far and what for has it been accusing the Iranian citizens of committing this crime during the course of the past 20 years?” Afkham asked.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran has many times announced in talks with Argentinean officials that accusing Iranian citizens in case of the AMIA explosion is an instrument aimed at concealing the real agents involved in that crime, and now the comments by these (two) ambassadors bear proof to that reality,” she said.

Iranian and Argentinean officials in a meeting in September agreed to continue talks on the 1994 deadly bomb attack on AMIA center in Buenos Aires.

The issue was raised in a meeting between Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his Argentinean counterpart Hector Timmerman on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

During the meeting, the two top diplomats discussed the method to implement the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) recently inked by the two countries on AMIA case.

On January 27, former Iranian foreign minister and Timmerman signed an agreement to jointly probe into the bombing of the AMIA building in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people in 1994.

"This initiative has prevented some countries and political currents from interfering in our good relations with the Latin American states," former Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mehman-Parast said at the time.

He noted that Israel was trying to link the AMIA deadly incident to Iran, but Tehran's agreement with Buenos Aires prevented Tel Aviv from achieving its goal.

"The AMIA bombing is a fully suspicious case and no independent and impartial fact-finding mission had ever been commissioned to deal with it (before)," Mehman-Parast added.

After Iran and Argentina signed the deal over AMIA, the Israeli regime showed an angry reaction. "We are stunned by this news item and we will want to receive from the Argentine government a complete picture as to what was agreed upon because this entire affair affects Israel directly," Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Yigal Palmor said on January 28.

In a statement on January 30, however, the Argentinean Foreign Ministry said Israel's demand for explanation over the agreement, described by Argentinean President Fernandez as "historic," was an "improper action that is strongly rejected."

Under intense political pressure from the US and Israel, Argentina had formally accused Iran of having carried out the bomb attack. The Islamic Republic has categorically denied any involvement in the terrorist bombing.
 

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