BERN, Dec. 26 (JTA) Switzerland has extradited to Argentina a man accused of giving false evidence in connection with the 1994 car bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
Two Argentine police officers accompanied the accused, Wilson Roberto Dos Santos, on a flight out of Zurich late last Friday, Swiss authorities said.
Dos Santos, a Brazilian citizen, was arrested in Switzerland in March on an international warrant.
Argentine authorities accuse Dos Santos of falsely claiming to police that he tipped off a local diplomat about the planned attack on the AMIA center four months before it happened. The attack killed 86 people and wounded some 300.
According to police, Dos Santos claimed his information came from a former Iranian girlfriend who allegedly had links to terrorist groups.
The woman was arrested in 1998 in connection with the AMIA attack and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people. She later was released for lack of evidence.
In another development, a Swiss police source told JTA that a botched wiretapping by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency in 1998 was linked to the 1992 embassy attack.
Five Mossad agents were caught in 1998 as they tried to wiretap the phone conversations of a businessman living in an apartment near the Swiss capital of Bern.
On that same day, Swiss officials had gotten a request from Argentina about the businessman, the police source said.
Meanwhile, Swiss investigators are saying that an arms dealer named Monzer al-Kasser was responsible for buying the explosives and the car used in the embassy bombing.
According to documents seized by Swiss police, some of the explosives were shipped to Argentina via Damascus.
Argentine police say Kasser was in Argentina at the time of the embassy attack as a guest of then-President Carlos Menem.
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