In an appointment Israel called out as “shameful,” Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi appointed international criminal and former defense minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as his interior minister. Vahidi was blacklisted by the US and placed on an Interpol “red notice” list for his role in the bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina. The four other surviving suspects of the Buenos Aires bombing are also thought to be in Iran.

In 1994, a Lebanese suicide bomber carried out a car bombing terror attack in the AMIA (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds. The terrorist bomber, who was later identified as a member of the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah terror group, was aided by Iranian operatives and other Hezbollah members.

“Iran’s new interior minister Vahidi is a criminal wanted by Interpol for the murder of 85 people in the horrible 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement issued on Wednesday night. “The international community must condemn this shameful appointment.”

“This is the face of Iran’s new terrorist government in Iran: President Raisi, the ‘Butcher of Tehran,’ responsible for killing thousands of Iranians, and ministers responsible for murdering people around the world,” the statement concluded.

In 2015, Alberto Nisman, the Jewish Argentine federal prosecutor who served as the chief investigator of the bombing, was found murdered a day before he was to present evidence against former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other senior government officials of collaborating with Iran to cover up the attack.

Raisi also appointed anti-Westerner and Holocaust denier Hossein Amirabdollahian, who is closely associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force and Hezbollah, as his foreign minister.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)