Herzliya, Israel, 16 September 2019
This 19th Annual Conference, dubbed “The Davos Forum Against Terror,” drew some 1,400 politicians, academics, security officials and media, including candidates in the forthcoming Israeli elections.
Invited for the 8th year running, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, brought attention to the role and fungibility of both African “conflict gold” and the disappearance of most of Venezuela’s gold reserve in the context of terrorism.
Both melted down - mostly in Entebbe, Uganda - their DNA is camouflaged to, inter alia, likely reach terrorist groups under the patronage of Iran.
Samuels had shared his findings with CNN and consulted with, among others:
- United States Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Ms. Sigal Mandelker
- EUROPOL Deputy Executive Director, Will van Gemert
- Argentine Legal Counsel for AMIA Buenos Aires Jewish Centre victims of Iranian terrorism, Miguel Bronfman
- William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defence Studies, Professor David Spencer
- Special Representative for Portugal on behalf of the interim President J. Guaido, Venezuela
- National Lead for Counter-Terrorism Policing in Scotland Yard, Neil Basu.
Samuels with (left) EUROPOL's Will van Gemert and with (right)
Amb. José R. Cots Malave and Prof. David Spencer.
In 1997, Samuels, with the assistance of the now defunct Tripartite Gold Commission and then Governor of the Central Bank of Spain, tracked the WWII gold flow from Europe to Latin America.
At that time, a burning question was whether part of those ingots could have included “Zahngold” (teeth gold), pulled from the mouths of bodies between the gas chamber and the crematoria of Auschwitz and other death camps.
“The irony,” stressed Samuels, “would be whether such gold, melted and remelted, following the Holocaust, reaches Iran, intent on completing the extermination of the Jewish people, from the AMIA Centre to the State of Israel.”