In May 2018, Panamanian President Juan Varela issued a public promise that briefly made international headlines and was much heralded: After nearly 25 years, Panama would open a full investigation into the mid-air bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901, which killed 22 Panamanians, including 12 of that country’s leading Jewish businessmen.
The promise of investigation into an unattributed bombing mystery, all but forgotten outside Panama, came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of a diplomatic meeting last year with Panamanian President Juan Varela, gave him specific intelligence information ascribing the tragedy to the terrorist group Hezbollah and its patron Iran.
No world government had ever acknowledged the downing of Flight 901 as an Islamic terror attack, even though it happened one day after Iran-Hezbollah bombed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AIMA) building in Buenos Aires, killing 85 civilians, most of them Argentinian Jews, and injuring 300. In contrast with Panama, Argentina eventually mounted thorough, though troubled, investigations of the AIMA attack and a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. These exposed for the first time the extent of Iranian-Hezbollah projection of power into the Western Hemisphere and its operating methods via clandestine support cells, local expatriate sympathizers, and Iranian embassies used for diplomatic cover.
But months of requests by the authors of this report for an update on the Panamanian investigation’s progress ran into an apparent determination to not speak of it, either on or off the record, with or without attribution. After a January 2019 report by Todd Bensman from Panama casting initial doubt that the promised investigation got underway, the Middle East Forum funded additional reporting efforts by the Spanish-speaking Uruguayan-Israeli journalist Jana Beris, who continued to seek confirmation in Israel and in Panama through the summer of 2019.
But neither journalist could obtain any such confirmation from any quarter during continuing 2019 reporting efforts, to include government channels in both countries in addition to Panama’s Jewish community, local journalists, and elected political party leaders.
What is all but confirmed instead is that the promised investigation was never launched.
“I think silence, both from the Israeli and Panamanian side, is the message,” Beris observed after her effort.