Argentinian Judge Requests Russia to Extradite Ali Akbar Velayati

While Ali Akbar Velayati, advisor to the Iranian leader on international affairs, traveled to Moscow to deliver a message from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a judge in a terrorism case in Buenos Aires requested Russia to extradite him for trial in Argentina. According to the Russian news agency Sputnik on Wednesday, July 10, citing Buenos Aires media, Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, a federal judge in Argentina, submitted a request for the extradition of Ali Akbar Velayati to Moscow. Judge Corral is responsible for the case of the AMIA bombing, which targeted the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, in 1994; in that explosion, 85 people were killed and over three hundred were injured, and the seven-story building of this Jewish organization was destroyed. The AMIA explosion occurred during the period when Ali Akbar Velayati was the Foreign Minister of Iran under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Mr. Velayati was suspected of being a member of the planning commission for that explosion; a plot that was allegedly executed in collaboration with Imad Mughniyeh, the operational commander of Hezbollah. About thirteen years after that explosion, an international arrest warrant was issued against Mr. Velayati and several other Iranian officials at the time for their alleged connection to this terrorism. In recent years, Ali Akbar Velayati has been the president of Azad University, but in his role as international advisor to Ali Khamenei, he travels to several countries in the region and the world. Iranian media have assessed his current mission in Moscow as critical for Iran in recent years. In the past three years, in most instances when Ali Akbar Velayati has left Iran, Judge Corral has submitted extradition requests to the countries he visited. Following Judge Corral's requests from Malaysia and Singapore, a similar request was made to the Iraqi government during Velayati's visit to Iraq two years ago; however, all these requests remained unaddressed. While Iran has always denied its involvement in the AMIA explosion, Israel and the Jewish community in Argentina have accused several Argentine officials over different periods of deliberately delaying investigations into this incident. Despite Iran's denial of involvement in the AMIA incident, several Israeli media outlets reported that there is also suspicion regarding his role in planning the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina. In the embassy bombing, 29 people were killed and 242 were injured, most of whom were Argentine nationals and non-Jews; Iran has also strongly denied any connection to the embassy explosion, and the Argentine judiciary has never officially pursued Iranian officials at the time as suspects in this incident. Concurrently with Ali Akbar Velayati's presence in Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also met and negotiated with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, focusing on Iranian affairs. However, Mr. Velayati met with President Putin in the Kremlin on Thursday. According to Iranian and Russian media, Mr. Velayati stated after this meeting that his discussions with Mr. Putin were about the 'strategic' bilateral relations of the two countries, regional cooperation, and the joint policies of Tehran and Moscow regarding Syria and Iraq.