March 13, 2003	Thursday	Muharram 9, 1424

TEHRAN, March 12: Iran has recalled its top diplomat in Buenos Aires after an Argentine judge issued arrest warrants for Iranian officials in connection with a deadly 1994 bombing, the state news agency IRNA said Wednesday.

The charge d’affaires, Mohammad Ali Tabatabai, was recalled to Tehran for consultations, foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi told IRNA.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries were already lowered in the aftermath of the 1994 bombing in downtown Buenos Aires of a Jewish charities agency that killed 85 people.

Tehran could follow up on Tabatabai’s recall with a cut in relations, a government source said, asking not to be named.

In January, two Argentine prosecutors requested the detention of 17 suspects based on intelligence service reports, which local newspapers said were pinning blame on Tehran and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.

Argentina, home to 300,000 Jews, has the third largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel, after the United States and France.

On Friday, Judge Juan Jose Galeano’s warrant named four officials, including Iran’s former intelligence and security minister Ali Fallahian, and former embassy cultural attache Moshen Rabbani.

Embassy employee Barat Ali Balesh Abadi was also named, while the judge upheld an existing warrant, dating from August 9, 1994, for Ali Akbar Parvaresh, a former official who had been fingered by an Iranian dissident.

Explaining his 400-page ruling, Galeano cited “responsability in the attack on the AMIA (Argentine Jewish Mutual Association) of radical militant elements in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The Iranian dissident charged that former Argentine president had allegedly been paid 10 million dollars, deposited in a Swiss bank account, to cover up Tehran’s responsibility for the bombing.—AFP