A forthcoming report from one of Argentina’s top security agencies will confirm that Alberto Nisman — the special prosecutor who investigated the July 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed — was murdered in his apartment on January 18, 2015.
Nisman was found dead one day before he was due to present a complaint to the Argentine Congress accusing leading politicians, including former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, of colluding with Tehran to cover up Iranian culpability for the atrocity. A team of investigators appointed by the Kirchner government concluded — following a controversial investigation that was heavily criticized by Nisman’s family — that the special prosecutor committed suicide using a gun supplied to him by Diego Lagomarsino, a computer specialist employed by Nisman.
But a new report from the Gendarmeria, a federal security force, will put the suicide theory to bed once and for all and show that Nisman was murdered, according to Argentine news outlets. The report’s publication is expected within the next thirty days, the Clarin newspaper said.
“This is a major development,” Eamonn MacDonagh — an expert on Argentine politics who has written widely on the Nisman case — told The Algemeiner. “Once Eduardo Taiano, the fiscal, or prosecutor, has the report in his hand, he’ll be able to say that this is a murder investigation.”
Commissioned by Taiano and investigating judge Julian Ercolini toward the end of 2016, the Gendarmeria report is based on a careful reconstruction of the crime scene at Nisman’s Buenos Aires apartment. Officials close to the investigation said that it was likely to confirm the widespread suspicion that Nisman was murdered.
An unnamed intelligence source told the La Nacion newspaper that “the results will be in accord with what has always been said — that Nisman couldn’t have been alone when he died, because of the position of his body when it was found.”
Writing in Clarin, journalist Julio Blanck listed some of the faults of the original investigation into Nisman’s death led by Viviana Fein, a Kirchner ally. “The position of the body, the spot where the weapon was found, the missing details as to when the special prosecutor was shot in the head and died — all those inaccuracies were part of the thick fog from Cristina’s government to distract from the truth about the case,” Blanck wrote.
Much as Nisman himself experienced when he began investigating the accusations that President Kirchner had engaged in a cover-up of Iran and its Hezbollah proxy’s responsibility for the AMIA bombing, Taiano has also received threats and warnings not to pursue his inquiries. One text message he received in December last year told him to “stop f__g about with that son of a b__ Jew,” a reference to Nisman, and added, “your days are numbered.”
The complaint Nisman had been due to announce would have implicated Kirchner, former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other officials in negotiating a secret pact with the Iranians to absolve Tehran of the AMIA bombing. Nisman’s tenacious investigation — including a log of more than 4,000 monitored phone calls — strongly suggested that in doing so, Kirchner and her colleagues were trying to cover their tracks.
Relatives of the AMIA victims have reacted positively to the news of the Gendarmeria report. “We are getting closer and closer to find out what happened,” Luis Czyzewski, whose daughter, Paola, died in the bombing, said. The next step, Czyzewski told La Nacion, was to discover “what happened in the legal system and know the names of those responsible.”
MacDonagh cautioned that numerous “legal roadblocks” could still be placed in front of the Nisman investigation. Kirchner’s supporters would seek to have the report “annulled,” he said.
“When Ercolini refuses, they will appeal in every judicial forum available to them, which will drag out the whole process,” MacDonagh noted.