BUENOS AIRES — Five days after a bombing at a Jewish cultural center here killed 85 people, the investigating judge on the case rushed to Venezuela after a lead. Upon his return, Judge Juan Jose Galeano bragged to reporters that "when you find out what I've learned, it will knock your socks off."
Ten years later, the only men ever arrested and tried in the case -- a car thief and a group of local police officers -- were acquitted and set free. The attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Assn., which also wounded more than 200 people, traumatized the 300,000-strong Jewish community here. Despite pressure to find the bombers and bring them to justice, the investigation -- and trial -- was fraught with blunders.
In October, a new panel of judges assigned to the case issued a 4,500-page finding that focused on the allegedly criminal conduct of Judge Galeano himself. The panel said Galeano had "constructed" the case against the now-exonerated defendants with lies, at the service of "unscrupulous officials," including the head of the State Intelligence Service, Argentina's domestic and international spy agency.
Hundreds of hours of wiretap recordings were lost. Even though a suicide bomber was said to have set off the explosion, no DNA samples were taken from the scene. Galeano was videotaped discussing a $400,000 payment he had made to the car thief, the central defendant in the case.
The judicial panel traced the mishandling of the case to former Interior Minister Carlos Corach, and even implicated a top leader in the Jewish community, Ruben Beraja, now under arrest on fraud charges. Many observers here believe the case was manipulated to further the ambitions of then-President Carlos Menem.
In 2002, an exiled Iranian intelligence officer said Menem received $10 million from the Iranian government to cover up Tehran's role in the bombing. Menem, who would face unrelated corruption charges if he returned from exile in Chile, has denied any involvement in a cover-up.
The investigation and the trial came apart because of two ills that plague the Argentine criminal justice system and other democratic institutions here: incompetence and corruption. That result has left many here feeling betrayed.
"I'm basically ashamed of what happened here," said Joe Goldman, an American television producer and longtime Buenos Aires resident. "The case was too big for the federal judge assigned to it. It was all done with a kind of planned incompetence."
In the weeks and months after the bombing, Goldman and a team of reporters gathered evidence in the surrounding neighborhood, finding many shards of metal and some human remains. They turned it over to Galeano, only to hear him say later he had "lost" it.
Although such blunders are common in judicial proceedings here, many had hoped they would not surface in the most important criminal trial since Argentina's former military rulers were hauled into court in the mid-1980s.
The irregularities in the cultural center case are "typical of the lack of oversight and the illegality with which the Argentine state has operated for many years," said Horacio Verbitsky, who has written on the justice system here. "This is the legacy of the dictatorship, and of the destruction of the values of accountability and responsibility."
At the time, newspapers across the globe noted that the bombing was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack outside Israel since the Holocaust.
Early suspicion focused on Iranian diplomats here. Just days after the attack, a witness told investigators that the bombing had its origins in the Middle East and a local cell of militant Islamic fundamentalists.
In the years since, more witnesses have stepped forward to say that a shadowy Colombian of Lebanese descent played a key role in its planning, and that the explosives used were smuggled in via ship from Brazil.
Upon his return from Venezuela, Galeano drove directly to meet Menem. The judge is said to have told Menem that four Iranian diplomats in Buenos Aires had planned the bombing, including Mohsen Rabbani, the embassy's cultural attache.
The Argentine Supreme Court eventually ruled there was insufficient evidence to try the diplomats.
Those who were still in Argentina left, never to return. Galeano's investigation focused instead on Carlos Telleldin, the car thief, who had been arrested nine days after the bombing.
Telleldin was the only man said to be linked by a piece of physical evidence to the bombing. He allegedly sold the van used in the attack -- a vehicle some experts doubt ever existed.
Many victims' families hoped that Telleldin's trial might reveal the larger, international conspiracy they believed was behind the bombing.
