Cloak & daggerMystery surrounding Argentinian prosecutor’s death deepens
Iranian intelligence operatives, using Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad agents, plotted and carried out two massive bombings in Buenos Aires twenty years ago: In 1992 a bomb destroyed the Israeli embassy, killing twenty-nine and injuring 242. In 1994, a powerful car-bomb exploded outside a Jewish Federation building, killing eighty-five and injuring 150. Former president Carlos Menem is already facing charges of being bribed by Iran to help hide the involvement of Iranian officials and their local accomplices in the two attacks. Alberto Nisman, a federal prosecutor investigating the involvement of the current president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, in the cover-up, announced that a 320-page report he had prepared, and a large volume of supporting evidence, conclusively proved that Fernandez and her foreign minister,Héctor Timerman, negotiated a secret deal with Iran to keep Iran’s responsibility for the early 1990s’ attacks under wraps in exchange for a lucrative grain-for-oil deal. A day before Nisman was to present his findings to the Argentine parliament, he was found dead in his apartment.
Argentine investigators are unraveling the details surrounding the death of Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor who was in charge of the inquiry on the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) headquarters in Buenos Aires, which killed eighty-five people and injured at least 150. Nisman was found dead on 18 January in the bathroom of his apartment, with a bullet in his right temple and a .22-caliber gun next to him, and officials were quick to declared Nisman’s death a suicide.
Sixty-six percent of the Argentine public believes he was assassinated.
Two years before the 1994 bombing, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing twenty-nine people and wounding 242. Islamic Jihad, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim group with ties to Iran, claimed responsibility for that attack.
In 2006, Nisman filed a criminal complaint alleging that Iran and another Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, carried out the AMIA bombing as a response to Argentina’s decision to stop supplying nuclear materials and technology for Iran’s nuclear program. The organizer of the attack was an Iranian intelligence operative posing as the cultural attache at the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires, and the orders for the attack, according to the complaint, came from top Iranian officials.
Nisman said that that evidence, including phone records, bank transfers, and the departure of Iran’s ambassador and deputy chief of mission from Argentina days before the attack, implicated Iran in the attack.
Iran has since denied involvement and refused to extradite the suspects.
Nisman also claimed to have evidence proving former president Carlos Menem, who was president of Argentina in the 1990s, and several officials in the intelligence services helped hide the tracks of local accomplices, among them a Syrian-Argentine businessman, and of the Iranian operatives and bombers. The Los Angeles Times notes that Menem, the son of Syrian immigrants, is awaiting trial on charges of obstructing the investigation.
Nisman’s investigation went further, alleging that Argentine current president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, had secretly negotiated an agreement with Iran to prevent prosecution of the former Iranian officials in exchange for favorable trade deals, including Argentine grain for Iranian oil.. This allegation was included in a report Nisman submitted to a judge five days before Nisman’s dead body was found.
Viviana Fein, the prosecutor investigating Nisman’s death, has described it as “suspicious.”
Family members and friends have denied that Nisman committed suicide. His ex-wife, federal Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, reported that before his death she received in the mail a magazine photo of Nisman tagged with a black mark in the shape of a bullet hole.
Shortly after Nisman’s death, President Fernandez de Kirchner wrote on her Facebook page that she was “convinced” that Nisman had not committed suicide. She suggested several possible scenarios to explain his death, including one in which rogue elements in the government’s Secretariat of Intelligence killed him because “those who wanted to use him alive now want to use him dead.” She has since disbanded the agency and drafted a bill to form a new intelligence body.
Investigators searching Nisman’s apartment have found a twenty-six-page draft warrant for the arrest of Fernandez de Kirchner and Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister. Nisman had been scheduled to appear, a day after his body was found, before an investigative committee of the Argentine Congress to provide about his accusations.
“It would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” said political analyst Sergio Berensztein about the impact of the arrest requests — if they had been issued. “It would have been a scandal on a level previously unseen,” Berensztein said.
