5 Acquitted in '94 Bombing of a Jewish Center in Argentina
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/international/americas/03argent.html"The trial of four Argentine police officers and a car thief, accused of providing the vehicle used in a deadly terrorist bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, ended Thursday in the acquittal of all the defendants. It was the longest, most complex trial in Argentine history, nearly three years, with 1,284 witnesses.
The verdict was reached 10 years after the attack on the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300 in what remains the deadliest anti-Semitic incident anywhere since World War II. For months, prominent Jews had warned that judicial misconduct and an official cover-up were ruining a true inquiry and preventing the main culprits from facing justice.
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Originally, 22 people, most of them officers of the corrupt Buenos Aires provincial police, were accused of being involved in the theft and sale of a van that was used to blow up the community center on July 18, 1994. But charges were dropped against some because of lack of evidence, and in other cases the statute of limitations ran out before trial. Five of the 22 ultimately went on trial, starting on Sept. 24, 2001.
But the case began to fall apart late last year, when the magistrate in charge of the investigation stage, Juan José Galeano, was ousted because he had approved a $400,000 payment to one of the defendants who in turn implicated others.----------------------------------------
Another difficult day for Argentina.
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