A Libyan official says Argentina's visiting president has offered her country's help in developing nuclear energy in the North African nation. Libyan Cabinet official Mohammed al-Mesmari says the Argentine leader also signed agreements in trade, agriculture and science during her meeting with Moammar Gadhafi. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez's six-day tour of North Africa also included stops in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria. The trip was meant in part to help ensure developing countries...

BUENOS AIRES (JTA) -- Former Argentine officials accused of blocking the investigation into the AMIA bombing will testify before a federal judge. Ex-president Carlos Menem is among seven ex-officials who are being called on to testify in the coming days by Ariel Lijo. Others among the seven former officials on Lijo’s list are intelligence service office head Hugo Anzorregui and the judge in charge of the case, Juan Jose Galeano. Lijo is trying to find out if the officials backed away...

U.S. officials have warned of a real danger Islamist extremists could form alliances with wealthy and powerful Latin American drug lords to launch new terrorist attacks against the United States. According to recent remarks made by Under Secretary of Intelligence and Analysis in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Charles Allen, at a two-day conference hosted by SOUTHCOM and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA); “The threat of ties between criminal...

UNITED NATIONS - Argentine President Cristina Fernández asked Iran on Tuesday to hand over several citizens suspected of planning the deadly 1994 bombing of an Argentine Jewish center, so they can face a local trial. "I would ask the Islamic Republic of Iran in accordance with international law... accept that Argentine justice can put on trial... those citizens who have been accused," Fernández told the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Argentina has asked for...

Islam in Argentina is represented by one of Latin America's largest Muslim minorities. Although accurate statistics on religion are not available (because the national census does not solicit religious data) the actual size of Argentina's Muslim community is estimated between 2-2.5% of the total population (300,000-900,000) [1] Early Muslim immigration Though early Spanish and Portuguese explorers and immigrants to the New World were very familiar with Muslims and Islamic culture (due to...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Islam Online) - Residents of Palermo, a large middle-class district in Buenos Aires, are used to seeing their skyline change. New high-rise apartment towers, enormous shopping malls, shiny gas stations and U.S.-style fast food outlets are constantly erupting between the parks and plazas that represent an older, more leisurely city. But now a different kind of building has appeared right in the heart of this traditional neighborhood, occupying an eight-acre triangle...

In a Friday sermon that aired on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV on April 11, 2008, Yunis Al-Astal, Hamas MP and cleric, told worshipers that Rome, "the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital," would soon be conquered by Islam, just as Constantinople was. It then, he said, would become "an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe." The following are...

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Islamic terrorist groups have networks in Latin America and the Caribbean and could use the region as a base to launch attacks on the United States, the senior U.S. military commander for the region says. “For sure, members, facilitators, and sympathizers of Islamic terrorist organizations are present in our hemisphere,” Adm. Jim Stavridis, head of the U.S. Southern Command, wrote in an article in the fall edition of Americas Quarterly journal, obtained by...

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent. From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of...

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay -- For years, this region -- where the boundaries of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina converge -- has been considered a teeming stew of globalization's more unseemly byproducts. Much of the trade that crosses the borders, officials say, is illegitimate. The region is full of smuggled goods and laundered money. Now U.S. officials are launching a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that they believe are funding Hezbollah and other...