Wiesenthal Center Slams Venezuelan President's Insidious Characterization of the Mass Murder Terrorist Attack on the AMIA Buenos Aires Jewish Centre

August 10, 2022

Buenos Aires and Paris - Earlier this week Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro labeled the horrific terrorist attack against the AMIA Jewish Center in 1994, which left 85 dead and over 300 innocent people injured, as a "false positive."

“What an unspeakable outrage! Without question Maduro is calling that horrific mass murder outrage as self-inflicted or a lie,” charged Ariel Gelblung, Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin American Director. “Such a blasphemy of the memory of the innocent victims serves the interests of the notorious Iranian regime which has deflected all efforts by Argentina and INTERPOL to bring five individuals including two high-ranking Iranian officials, to justice.”

Maduro’s slander comes against the backdrop of an Emtrasur jumbo jet cargo plane which for two months has been sitting on the tarmac at the Ezeiza airport in Argentina.

It turns out that the plane was transporting Iranians with alleged links to terrorist organizations. The plane originally belonged to the Iranian airline, Mahan Air. The plane, and seven members of its crew have been held in Argentina by court order since June 6th.

The Venezuelan regime has launched a fierce campaign to gain the release of the plane, alleging that Argentina is submitting to pressure from the US.

Dr. Shimon Samuels, SWC Director for International Relations, noted that “the intensifying cooperation between Venezuela and Iran includes the presence of Hezbollah elements who have been granted Venezuelan passports, collaboration on oil supplies, providing more than one million hectares of Venezuelan land to Iran, and the transmission of the Iranian news channel Hispan TV, from Venezuela across the Americas.”

For further information, please contact Dr. Shimon Samuels at +336 09770158 or Dr. Ariel Gelblung at +54 9 11 49695365, join the Center on Facebook, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent directly to your Twitter feed.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).