Case fileInvestigations and enforcementNetwork studyTriple Frontier

Calls Across the Border

24 Min Read
24 Min Read
Memorial clock at Pasteur station displaying 09:53 and the date 18 July 1994.
The Pasteur station memorial clock commemorates the AMIA bombing: 9:53 a.m., 18 July 1994. Photograph: June 2015.Photo: Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.5 AR. Unmodified.
CN-02

Published by Cartel DocsAbout 14 minutes to read

Investigations · The overseas apparatus

Contents
  1. A number, a broker, a border
  2. The network acquires names
  3. What survives the arrest
  4. The investigators’ broken road
  5. Sources

In the tense, humid winter of July 1994, two fleeting telephone calls bridged the distance between the transit hubs of Buenos Aires and the porous borderlands where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay converge[1]. On July 1, a payphone at Ezeiza International Airport dialed a cellular number registered in the Tri-Border Area under the alias André Marques; on the morning of July 18, another urgent signal crackled from Aeroparque Jorge Newbery to the exact same handset[1]. Minutes later, at 9:53 a.m., a suicide truck bomb detonated at Pasteur 633, reducing the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) community center to rubble and claiming eighty-five lives[1],[4]. While rescue workers sifted through the debris to recover an engine block that led back to used-car dealer Carlos Telleldín, federal investigators were left staring at a telephonic ghost trail that crossed international frontiers[1],[4]. Decades later, as American and Argentine prosecutors finally unsealed indictments against the alleged logistics coordinators, the case of the AMIA bombing stands as an enduring testament to how border geography, corrupted judicial mechanics, and sovereign impunity can stall justice across generations[1],[2],[4].

At 9:53 on July 18, the explosion struck the Jewish community institution at Pasteur 633[4]. Eighty-five people died[4]. Investigators subsequently recovered an engine component and followed its serial number to Carlos Telleldín, the vehicle’s last owner[4]. One inquiry moved outward through telephone contacts; another began with a piece of metal in the rubble[1],[4].

The first route would lead toward Lebanese operatives, Iranian officials and businesses scattered across South America[1],[9]. The second would become entangled in a paid statement and a corrupted investigation[4]. Both routes mattered[1],[4]. To understand why the case lasted so long, it is necessary to follow the people suspected of helping the attackers—and the officials entrusted with finding them[1],[4].

Following the contacts

Two calls. One destination.

The call pattern described in the U.S. indictment.

1 JULY 1994
Ezeiza International Airport

Call from an airport payphone

18 JULY 1994
Aeroparque Jorge Newbery

A second airport call

ONE DESTINATION
Cellphone registered in the Tri-Border Area

“André Marques”

Registration alias described in the indictment

Call pattern alleged in the El Reda indictment. Arrows indicate telephone contact. [1]

A number, a broker, a border

The American indictment identifies Samuel Salman El Reda as a connector[1]. It alleges that he established roots in Buenos Aires and the border region in 1987 and developed relationships with Iranian cultural attaché Mohsen Rabbani and businessman Assad Ahmad Barakat[1]. It also describes an Argentine account Rabbani opened in December 1993: approximately $150,000 arrived between April and July 1994, including three transfers from Bank Melli Iran[1]. These are prosecution allegations about preparations and financing, not a traced cocaine payment[1].

El Reda also appears in American sanctions records as Salman Raouf Salman[9]. In July 2019, Treasury accused him of coordinating the Buenos Aires attack squad, leaders in Lebanon and a logistics command in the tri-border area[9]. It alleged contact with Barakat before the bombing[9]. The designation accompanied a reward offer of up to $7 million for information identifying or locating him[9]. The target of the financial measure was a person alleged to connect several places, rather than a place treated as guilty by association[9].

The connection was possible in a region already organized around movement[12]. In Manifold Destiny, historian John Tofik Karam places its commercial growth within the east-west corridor joining Paraguay to Brazil[12]. He describes Barakat living with his Brazilian wife and children in Foz do Iguaçu while conducting business across the border in Paraguay[12]. Crossing a bridge could connect household and shop, not simply two clandestine assignments[12]. That ordinary geography is essential to understanding the setting[12].

A 2024 study of the tri-border economy describes a further overlap: legal commerce and illicit markets use roads, airports, urban trading centers and sometimes the same intermediaries[30]. Infrastructure does not acquire a different shape when a criminal customer uses it[30]. Investigators must identify the customer, cargo or payment within the larger flow[30]. The region’s usefulness to illicit networks arises partly from its usefulness to everyone else doing business there[30].

Barakat’s trading businesses supplied a more specific investigative target[10]. In June 2004, the U.S. Treasury designated him, Casa Apollo and Barakat Import Export, the latter based in Iquique, Chile[10]. Its allegations described coercive fundraising quotas imposed on shopkeepers, threats involving relatives in Lebanon and fraudulent borrowing[10]. Treasury said Barakat was already imprisoned in Paraguay for tax evasion[10]. A commercial network, in this account, could both produce money and pressure people to provide it[10].

Karam records a competing account[12]. A dispute over video-game distribution rights preceded terrorism accusations against Barakat; the businessman described a thank-you card from Hassan Nasrallah as recognition of donations to orphanages and said transfers concerned international commerce[12]. Those explanations do not dispose of the sanctions allegations[12]. They identify the dispute at its most concrete: what a business transaction, a remittance or a letter was actually evidence of[12].

Courts had already encountered that problem[29]. In December 2002, Brazil’s Supreme Court permitted Barakat’s extradition in part, excluding the accusation of apology of crime[29]. Dissenting justices questioned the specificity or political character of parts of the request[29]. Even before the 2004 sanctions, the legal path depended on particular offenses and admissible grounds for extradition[10],[29]. A broad allegation could attract international attention while still needing a narrower legal vehicle to move a suspect across a border[10],[29].

The network acquires names

Treasury’s December 2006 action expanded the sanctions to nine people and two entities[11]. It identified Barakat’s brothers Hamzi and Hatim and cousin Muhammad Fayez in different business or fundraising roles[11]. Hatim was described as an Iquique shareholder collecting funds; Muhammad Fayez allegedly managed finances and organized transfers to Lebanon[11]. Geography divided the work among the businesses and intermediaries the agency identified[11]. Farouk Omairi was accused of obtaining false documents and participating in international drug trafficking; Hamzi faced allegations involving drugs, arms and counterfeit goods[11]. These were named allegations about activities and relationships[11]. They gave the border story a structure more precise than the phrase “terrorist haven.”[11]

They also raised a chronological trap[11]. Evidence alleging criminal revenue in a later network cannot, by itself, explain how an earlier bombing was paid for[11]. The more revealing question is whether investigators identified recurring people and services: introductions, documents, businesses, communications and transfers[11]. The 2006 designations described such services; their immediate legal effect was to block assets under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit U.S. dealings, not to decide an Argentine murder case[11].

Years later, the inquiries found another crossing point: a casino[13]. Argentina’s financial intelligence unit, UIF, announced in July 2018 that it had frozen assets of suspected members of the Barakat clan[13]. At least fourteen people had been identified crossing from Brazil into Argentina[13]. UIF alleged that they collected more than $10 million in casino winnings without declaring the money at the border, crediting cooperation with American FinCEN[13]. Its explanation of criminal origins and onward transfers to Hezbollah was expressly an investigative hypothesis[13].

The movements were repetitive enough to leave records[14]. A UNICRI study, drawing partly on interviews with Judge Miguel Guerrero and his investigative team, reports 620 crossings by Hassan Ali Barakat between January 2015 and October 2017[14]. Hassan was not Assad; the shared surname must not erase the individual traveler[14]. The study also reports approximately $21.8 million entering the casino in 2010–2018 and $20.3 million withdrawn in 2012–2018[14]. Different periods prevent treating the difference as a reliable profit calculation[14]. The study also says investigators examined 296 identity documents associated with the group[14].

The striking detail is the change in the trail[13],[14]. An investigation that began with allegations about businesses and international connections could now examine repeated border entries and identifiable financial transactions[13],[14]. A casino cashier’s record and a crossing record answer different questions[13],[14]. Placed together, they can show movement without yet establishing the ultimate recipient or purpose of every payment[13],[14]. That distinction determines what the next investigator has to find[13],[14].

There were concrete failures inside the financial institution[21]. In January 2020, UIF imposed an administrative fine of 16,356,132 Argentine pesos on HCI and the specified responsible officers[21]. The resolution identified deficiencies in customer identification, monitoring and analysis of unusual transactions[21]. It allowed judicial appeal[21]. The finding concerned controls that should have made questionable activity easier to detect; it was not a terrorism conviction against the casino[21].

Meanwhile, Brazil arrested Assad Barakat in Foz do Iguaçu on September 21, 2018[28]. Prosecutor-General Raquel Dodge had requested preventive detention for extradition nine days earlier[28]. The Brazilian prosecution’s account dated the alleged document conduct to April 3 that year and argued that a refugee application alone did not stop extradition[28]. While the wider story concerned suspected international finance, this custody process turned on documents and the authority to surrender him[28].

In April 2021, a Paraguayan judge imposed a two-and-a-half-year sentence for false documents through an abbreviated procedure, according to ABC Color[16]. Time served exhausted the term, and an expulsion order followed[16]. Prosecutors said Barakat had obtained identity documents despite knowing his nationality had been canceled in 2008[16]. The resulting conviction was specific[16]. It did not convert every previous accusation against him into a judicial finding[16].

His lawyer, Jaimir Reinaldo Rezner, told Rádio Cultura that Paraguay had persecuted Barakat and made him a scapegoat[17]. He disputed the terrorism accusations and challenged the document case[17]. The station reported that Barakat completed entry formalities in Brazil and went home[17]. After years of international labeling, the ending of that particular prosecution was an ordinary movement across a border—the same geography that had made his case so difficult to contain[17].

What survives the arrest

Scholar Micael Alvino da Silva challenged the tendency to recycle expansive estimates of border crime and terrorism through research and news coverage[18]. Writing in 2018, he emphasized that the extradition request concerned an ordinary criminal offense[18]. His criticism does not demonstrate that financial support networks were imaginary[18]. It warns how easily a striking number or label can travel farther than the underlying case[18].

Governments faced that distinction as policy[15],[25]. Argentina froze Hezbollah-related assets and sought its entry in the new RePET register in July 2019; UIF also reported judicial confirmation of the Barakat-clan freeze[15]. Paraguay’s subsequent decree addressed designated groups, specifying Hezbollah’s armed militias[25]. Interior Minister Juan Ernesto Villamayor nevertheless emphasized that remittances to the Middle East were not necessarily terrorist financing[25]. Targeting a network required separating its transactions from the surrounding legitimate economy[15],[25].

GAFILAT’s 2022 evaluation of Paraguay exposed another limit in translating suspicion into judgment[24]. It distinguished convictions for terrorism or association from the absence, during the reviewed period, of convictions under the dedicated terrorist-financing offense[24]. The report discussed the financing law adopted in 2010 and amended in 2019[24]. The legal machinery had changed over time; counting an arrest, an asset freeze and a financing conviction as equivalent successes would conceal what each had actually achieved[24].

The network question remained[19]. In a 2026 INSS analysis, Noam Binstok, Orna Mizrahi and Esteban Klor describe Hezbollah’s financial resilience through dispersed companies, family members and business intermediaries[19]. Their argument helps explain why removing a person or targeting a financial institution may leave other connections intact[19]. It concerns a network embedded in commerce, not a presumption against Lebanese traders or diaspora communities as a whole[19].

RAND’s 2025 assessment supplies a different limit: considerable uncertainty surrounds Hezbollah’s existing operational capacity in Latin America, even as disrupted plots indicate persistent intent to develop it[20]. The assessment also warns against interpreting the absence of a documented government response as proof of inactivity[20]. The sensible picture contains both identifiable cases and unanswered questions about scale[20]. It cannot be reduced to a network that is either omnipotent or entirely fictional[20].

A September 2023 Treasury action illustrates the proposed continuity more directly[22]. It identified Amer Mohamed Akil Rada as an alleged AMIA participant who later coordinated commercial enterprises, including Colombian charcoal exports to Lebanon, and worked with Salman[22]. Treasury alleged that as much as 80 percent of his commercial proceeds benefited Hezbollah[22]. The allegation tied an identified business activity to an identified beneficiary, rather than treating every export from a country as suspect[22]. It also implicated Amer’s brother Samer in a fruit shipment containing 500 kilograms of cocaine seized in El Salvador[22]. These were sanctions allegations about distinct people and activities across different years[22].

Samer had publicly denied knowing about the cocaine in 2013[23]. He told Belize’s 7 News that his company had been hired to move the container from the western border to the free zone and that his employees had not loaded it[23]. His response belongs beside the later accusation[22],[23]. The family connection opens an investigative route; it does not eliminate the need to determine who knew what or turn a later cargo into the source of AMIA’s funding[22],[23].

The investigators’ broken road

Back in Buenos Aires, money had damaged the investigation itself[4]. Telleldín’s changed statement followed a $400,000 payment from reserved intelligence funds[4]. The 2004 trial annulled the tainted investigation[4]. In 2020, a later trial acquitted him because knowledge of the attack and intent to assist it had not been established[4]. The Inter-American Court’s 2024 judgment held Argentina responsible for failures of prevention, investigation and access to information, and for obstructing the truth[4].

Rebuilding the international case required more than repeating the original warrants[26]. In November 2007, INTERPOL’s General Assembly upheld publication of six of nine requested Red Notices after Iran challenged the request[26]. Its account stressed a fresh examination and warrants issued by a judge other than Juan José Galeano[26]. Corruption in the local inquiry had become an obstacle that the international process also had to confront[26].

INTERPOL had explained the boundary earlier that year: issuing or declining a notice did not establish the strength or weakness of the criminal case[27]. That question belonged to the judicial authorities[27]. The notice could help a case move across jurisdictions[27]. It could not substitute for the trial waiting at the other end[27].

Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death created a further investigation[8]. In January 2025, Eduardo Taiano’s office reaffirmed its hypothesis that Nisman had been murdered because of his AMIA-related work[8]. It also said investigators were still working to identify those who carried out the killing and those who ordered it[8]. The official account described another unresolved question around the pursuit of the original crime, not a completed judgment identifying its authors[8].

The April 2024 Argentine cassation decision had already delivered consequential findings[3]. Judge Carlos Mahiques’s opinion attributed the bombing’s planning, financing and execution to Iranian direction with Hezbollah’s principal participation[3]. The court unanimously classified AMIA as a crime against humanity[3]. But the defendants before it were in the cover-up case: its disposition included convictions, acquittals and revised sentences, including four years for Galeano on specified offenses[3]. It was not the long-awaited criminal trial of the absent alleged planners[3].

The American case had moved separately[2]. In December 2023, the Justice Department unsealed material-support and military-training charges against El Reda, describing him as at large in Lebanon at that time[2]. The passage of nearly three decades had produced another formal accusation in another jurisdiction[2]. It had not, in that announcement, produced the defendant[2]. Announcement and apprehension were still different events[2].

In April 2025, Argentine prosecutor Sebastián Basso requested proceedings in absentia against ten fugitives under a new law[5]. He invoked the earlier prosecution opinions and unsuccessful efforts to secure their appearance[5]. The proposed answer to decades of absence was to change how the case could reach trial[5].

On September 21, 2026, cassation rejected a challenge concerning the new procedure’s review provisions as premature[6]. The defense had withdrawn its broader constitutional challenge[6]. The remaining objection anticipated a conviction, a later appearance and a refused new trial—events that had not yet produced the claimed injury[6]. That decision addressed the road to adjudication; it did not deliver a verdict on the bombing[6].

For the people returning to Pasteur Street, the clock had never been procedural[7]. In 2022, after two remote pandemic commemorations, the public ceremony returned beneath a banner announcing that they were back at Pasteur[7]. At 9:53, a siren marked the hour[7]. Then came the remembrance of eighty-five victims[7]. The files had accumulated numbers of their own—accounts, calls, transfers, case references[7]. These were the names the investigation still had to answer to[7].

Sources

  1. United States v Samuel Salman El Reda, indictment unsealed December2023
  2. DOJ, El Reda terrorism charges announced,20December2023
  3. Argentine Federal Criminal Cassation, Galeano and others,11April2024
  4. Inter-American Court, Memoria Activa vArgentina,26January2024, official summary
  5. UFI-AMIA requests trial in absentia,8April2025
  6. Federal Criminal Cassation, Fallahijan appeal,21September2026
  7. Argentina, AMIA28thanniversary commemoration,18July2022
  8. Federal prosecution, Nisman death investigation,10January2025
  9. Treasury, Salman Raouf Salman designation,19July2019
  10. Treasury, Assad Barakat and two businesses designated, 10 June 2004
  11. Treasury, tri-border fundraising network designated, 6 December 2006
  12. John Tofik Karam, Manifold Destiny, Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
  13. Argentine UIF, Terrorist Financing action, 13 July 2018
  14. UNICRI, The Nexus between Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism in Latin America, 2024
  15. Argentine UIF, Hezbollah freeze and RePET request, 18 July 2019
  16. ABC Color, conviction followed by expulsion, 8 April 2021
  17. Dante Quadra, Rádio Cultura, interview with Barakat’s defense, 15 April 2021
  18. Micael Alvino da Silva, Revisitando o nexo Terrorismo-Tríplice Fronteira, 17 October 2018
  19. Noam Binstok, Orna Mizrahi and Esteban Klor, Hezbollah’s Global Financial Network, INSS, 3 May 2026
  20. RAND, Hezbollah in Latin America, 2025
  21. Argentine UIF, HCI administrative resolution 002/2020, 22 January 2020
  22. U.S. Treasury Sanctions Latin America-Based Hezbollah Financial Network
  23. 7 News Belize, Free Zone Business Owner Disclaims Any Knowledge, 6 August 2013
  24. GAFILAT, Paraguay mutual evaluation, September 2022
  25. Paraguay Agencia IP, decree and minister’s explanation, 19 August 2019
  26. INTERPOL General Assembly, AMIA notice decision,7November2007
  27. INTERPOL Executive Committee, AMIA notice dispute,March2007
  28. Brazilian MPF, arrest for extradition, September 2018
  29. Brazilian Supreme Court, extradition decision report, 19 December 2002
  30. Underworld Crossroads: Dark Networks and Global Illicit Trade in the Tri-Border Area, Small Wars Journal, 6 August 2024
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