Three men detained since January 3 by the Argentine police suspected of being part of a terrorist cell that was planning an attack in Buenos Aires have been released this Monday due to lack of evidence against them. A hairdresser from Buenos Aires, a table tennis teacher of Syrian origin and an alleged Spanish mercenary who accused them by posing as an “inorganic agent” of the United States embassy spent almost two weeks in prison while the Argentine Government narrated the plot in alive. The judge investigating the case ruled that the case was “lack of merit” and uncovered a story that collapsed after the Ministry of Security followed its leads for half a month.
The Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, had announced the capture of the three men on Wednesday, January 3, after an operation that monitored the Buenos Aires airports throughout the New Year's weekend. The three men, she said then, were going to enter the Argentine capital on separate flights and were waiting for a parcel that would arrive from Yemen. It was all false, but President Javier Milei's alignment with Israel during the conflict with Hamas in Gaza and the “iron fist” policy promoted by Bullrich mobilized the authorities. The Government was concerned that one of them had a reservation made at a hotel that was two blocks from the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
The plot, revealed days later a portal investigation elDiarioAR, had been the invention of a man named Juan Manuel Ledesma, an Argentine-Spanish man in his 50s, who called himself El Rubio. Ledesma denied before the judge that he was a US agent, as he had declared at the beginning, and claimed to be a former police officer, independent journalist, intelligence and security contractor and former member of the French Legion. The evidence he provided was a 2016 interview with the portal elespanol.com in which he recounted having participated in the rescue of 55 girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram guerrilla group in Nigeria two years earlier.
In his investigative statement, El Rubio stated that an acquaintance, a concierge at a hotel in the center of Buenos Aires, told him that the reservation of a guest of Syrian origin and a Venezuelan passport seemed suspicious. He then linked it with another story he had heard at the end of December: his hairdresser had stopped working at his usual place and when he asked his boss for the reasons, she told him that she had fired him and was worried that he would cause problems. The hairdresser had told him that he was close to being the victim of a scam on social networks, where he had met a supposed American woman who insisted that he make her a transfer of almost a thousand dollars for a gift that she would send him from Yemen. The man reported the scam, but because of his doubts, he told his boss to reject any suspicious packages in his name. El Rubio connected the dots and denounced the two men.
“I mentally put together the issue,” he stated in his statement before the judge. During those days, the Argentine president inaugurated the Pan American Maccabee Games, a multi-sports event for athletes of Jewish origin, tension in the Middle East was escalating in Gaza, Iran and Yemen, and the man thought that Argentina could be the target of an anti-Semitic attack as It was before in the nineties. He then alerted a well-known police officer who, in turn, alerted the Israeli embassy that an alleged terrorist cell made up of three people of Syrian-Lebanese origin and investigated in Colombia, was traveling to Argentina to “send something wrong.” Without being able to clarify the origin of his complaint, El Rubio was also arrested.
Ramón Alberto Domínguez, the hairdresser, chatted for months with an alleged woman who, after offering him gifts and telling him that she wanted to move to Argentina, began to threaten him to pay $900 for the supposed package that he was supposed to send her. Domínguez reported it in October, and the Argentine Federal Police maintained that it was “a typical scam,” as he detailed. the newspaper Page 12. While a judge was investigating, Domínguez was arrested for two weeks along with Naem Chatay Chassan, 67, who was traveling from Colombia to Argentina to set up a gym where he would teach table tennis classes, an activity he was already doing in Bogotá. The reservation he made in a modest hotel in the center of the Argentine capital, which coincidentally was two blocks from the Israeli embassy, and his dual nationality, fueled the fears of the Ministry of Security.
The judge in charge of the case, María Eugenia Capuchetti, released them on Monday, and considered that the evidence was “insufficient” to consider that the three men were part of a transnational criminal association, but ordered that “for the moment” they remain in the country while he finished his explanation. The Argentine Government has not made any statements in this regard.
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