On August 14, 1993, in Mashad, Iran’s second-largest city, the Iranian leadership’s “Committee for Special Operations” or “Omure Vijeh Committee,” convened to discuss its ongoing problems with Argentina — and specifically the flamboyant president, Carlos Menem.

Reorienting Argentina’s policy, moving his country closer to the West and to Israel, the Syrian-born Menem had severed the hitherto fruitful partnership between Buenos Aires and Tehran on all matters nuclear, first suspending and then terminating the training of Iranian nuclear technicians in Argentina and the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.

Iran had brutally shown its fury at Menem’s betrayal in 1992, when it organized the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people were killed. The August 1993 meeting determined that a further terrorist assault on Menem’s country was necessary. A Buenos Aires-based Iranian “diplomat,” Mohsen Rabbani, had flown in for the meeting with a list of three potential targets. AMIA, the multi-story Jewish community center office building, was the first of the three to be discussed, and it was approved.

A 2006 indictment in the case (PDF) names Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the head of the council, and says the final decision to attack the AMIA center was made by Khamenei and then-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah terror chief routinely charged with planning such atrocities, was subsequently flown from Lebanon to Iran and given instructions to coordinate the bombing. A Hezbollah activist named Ibrahim Berro — the fourth of five siblings of a Lebanese family with a long involvement in violence against Israel — was selected as the suicide bomber. And on July 18, 1994, Berro drove a white Renault Trafic van filled with explosives into the AMIA building, destroying it. The entire seven-story structure collapsed, 85 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded. Mughniyeh, who had directly overseen the preparations, was in Buenos Aires until days before the bombing.

We know all of this because of the indefatigable investigative work of one man, Alberto Nisman, who 10 years ago took over the investigation of the bombing. It was Nisman who traced the evidence, in what remains the worst-ever terrorist attack in Argentina, all the way back to that meeting of the Iranian leadership in Mashad.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.