After death, ex Argentina president criticised for response to AMIA bombing

The Argentine umbrella Jewish group DAIA has criticised, just hours after his death, ex-president Carlos Menem who was in office during both of the 1990s terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions.

 The Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations wrote in a Twitter thread last Sunday that Menem, 90, “dies in freedom, despite the fact his government used the institutions of the Argentine state to perpetuate impunity and cover up the responsibility of those who committed and were accomplices in the attacks”.

Menem was a national senator when he died at a Buenos Aires hospital. That office kept him out of prison after he was found guilty in 2013 of illegal arms smuggling to Ecuador and Croatia between 1991 and 1995. In March 2019, Menem – the son of Syrians who immigrated to the country – was absolved of charges that he tried to interfere with the investigation of the 1994 AMIA Jewish centre bombing, which killed 86.