Thirty-One Years Late Is Better Than Never — But the Mullahs Must Still Pay
Argentina's in-absentia trial of Iranian and Hezbollah suspects is historic — now the world must make Iran pay the price.
On July 18, 1994, a bomb-laden van was driven into the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and detonated. Eighty-five people were killed and more than 300 were wounded — the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. For thirty-one years, the mullahs in Tehran watched the investigation spiral into corruption and cover-ups and concluded, correctly, that there was no price to be paid. That calculation just changed.
Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas has ordered ten Iranian and Lebanese suspects to stand trial in absentia, including former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan, former Foreign Minister Ali Velayati, former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai, and Hezbollah operative Salman Raouf Salman. Each defendant now carries a $500 million lien. The court called the attack a "crime against humanity" ordered by the highest echelons of the Iranian regime and executed by its Lebanese proxy. That verdict — even in a pretrial ruling — is a legal stake through the heart of Tehran's thirty-year denial.
The road here was littered with sabotage. A federal judge was removed in 2005 for "serious irregularities" in handling the case. Then, in January 2015, special prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead from a gunshot wound the night before he was scheduled to present findings alleging that the Kirchner government had conspired to cover up Iranian involvement and negotiate immunity for the very suspects now facing trial. The prisoners always get paid — and so, it seems, do those who protect them.
What changed? Argentina under President Javier Milei passed Law No. 27.784 in March 2025, permitting trial in absentia for the first time. A government that calls morality a state policy built the legal architecture to use it. The Buenos Aires Federal Appeals Court confirmed Rafecas's ruling this week.
The $500 million liens are a start, not a finish. My work at Shurat HaDin has taught me that a court order without enforcement is a piece of paper. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the European Union must move immediately to freeze and seize Iranian sovereign assets wherever they can be reached. Washington and Brussels should also enforce the INTERPOL Red Notices that the named suspects have flouted on more than twenty international trips since 2007.
The AMIA bombing was not an isolated act of rage. Two years before AMIA, a truck bomb struck the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and wounding more than 200. One regime, one proxy, one pattern — and the same deliberate impunity. Terror is a financial enterprise. Make it ruinously expensive, and it stops.
Eighty-five people went to their community center on a Monday morning and never came home. They deserve more than a ruling. They deserve a bill that gets collected.