On the anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, a question mark still hangs over the unfinished investigation, says Javier Sinay

Today at 09:53 am a siren sounded in the centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's a shocking siren that, every 18 July, marks the exact hour in which the AMIA (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) building – an important Jewish community centre – was destroyed in a car bomb attack in 1994. The bombing killed 85 people and over 300 were injured, many of whom worked in areas of culture, education and religion at the AMIA. Others passed by on the street, perhaps unaware of the AMIA.

The attack was not only the largest antisemitic aggression in Argentine history, but the deadliest act of terrorism the country has ever faced. According to the Argentine Department of Justice and Mossad it was Hezbollah's most successful operation in the West. It was a painful trauma for Argentine society – one from which we have never recovered because it remains unpunished, without anyone proven guilty.

The paradox is that, in a world steeped in war and violence like that of 2024, there are few things more contemporary than writing about a terrorist attack in the 90s. The current time we live in is one of uncertainty and bloodshed – as it was in 1994.

The judicial investigation began immediately after the attack. Some leads immediately emerged and continue to this day. And immediately, too, the process became littered with negligence, destruction of evidence, alleged traps laid by the intelligence services and the police, and the unpredictability of global terrorism. Argentina’s justice system was overwhelmed.

My new book, Después de las 09:53 – AMIA: Cartografía de un Atentado (After 09:53 – AMIA: Cartography of an Attack), which has just published recently in Spanish, explores how the 30 days after the attack became a scale model of the 30 years that followed.

I interviewed many of the protagonists who had emerged in the first month of investigations, among others, the then judge Juan José Galeano, the main Argentine suspect Carlos Telleldín, the Jewish community leader Rubén Baraja, the former minister Carlos V Corach, the former vice chancellor Fernando Petrella, the former AMIA president Alberto Crupnicoff, agents of the Argentine secret service, the then prosecutors Eamon Mullen and José Barbaccia; and Diana Wassner, from Memoria Activa, the organisation of victims’ families. I delved into the activities of the late President Carlos Menem and the Iranian and Lebanese suspects.

I also spoke with people who are currently working on the case, such as prosecutor Sebastián Basso. I read the judicial file and its versions, as well as hundreds of pages of documents, many newspaper articles from July and August 1994 and all the previous books about the attack. For each question I had, I usually received two or three diametrically opposed answers.

When I had finished writing Después de las 09:53, I was left with many uncertainties. Firstly, more was assumed than has been proven. For example, it was assumed that the attacker was named Ibrahim Hussein Berro. But it could not be proven. We can accept that almost everything went wrong with the investigation – but not everything. Was the judiciary ready to face such a case? Of course not.

So why retell what happened on 18 July 1994? Perhaps because in the absence of justice, storytelling can be a space for reparation. It has the power to create a new narrative and this new meaning may just help us move forward with the same coherence that life once had before the horror.

By Javier Sinay

Después de las 09:53 – AMIA: Cartografía de un Atentado (After 09:53 – AMIA: Cartography of an Attack) by Javier Sinay is published by Random House Mondadori in Spanish. Read Javeier’s piece on Moisés Ville, the Jewish agricultural colony set up in Argentina at the end of the 19th century in the Spring 2024 issue of JR.