WATCH: Manuel Bojorquez reports on the latest findings by Argentinian investigators into the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
Please note: This story was updated on Feb. 4 to include new details about the investigation into Alberto Nisman’s death.
Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires home on Jan. 18, a day before he was due to give testimony about his investigation into Argentina’s worst terrorist attack and his claims Argentina’s president and other officials were involved in a cover-up.
Nisman was confident enough his findings, at one point, that he drafted a request for President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s arrest.
READ MORE: Request for Argentine president’s arrest found in dead prosecutor’s trash
The request, however, wasn’t a part of the complaint he filed with the federal court four days earlier concerning his investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (known by the Spanish acronym AMIA).
Nisman alleged Fernández de Kirchner, her foreign minister, and others, secretly worked on a deal that would protect the Iranian suspects in the attack from prosecution.
According to Chief Investigator Viviana Fein, the document was found in a garbage can, inside the 51-year-old’s luxury apartment.
Nisman, who died of a gunshot wound to the head, was found inside the apartment with a .22 calibre revolver by his side.
The government first reported the death as a suicide, but Fernández de Kirchner later recanted that claim and said, in a statement posted online, she was not convinced he took his own life.
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Her Jan. 26 announcement that she wanted to dissolve the country’s spy agency only fuelled fears Nisman was the victim of a murder plot.
READ MORE: Argentina’s president seeks to dissolve spy agency after prosecutor’s death
The question now is who may be responsible for the alleged killing.
Why are the circumstances surrounding Nisman’s death suspicious?
Nisman was found dead, from a single gunshot wound to the head, on Jan. 18. Initial forensic analysis uncovered no traces of gunpowder on his hands.
The .22-caliber revolver found at his side reportedly belonged to a colleague who loaned it to him.
The colleague, Diego Lagomarsino, is now facing a charge for allegedly loaning Nisman the firearm illegally.
In her statement on Jan. 22, the president raised concerns over purported messages Nisman sent to his friends, via Whatsapp, about returning early from a trip to Paris with his teenage daughter.
“What I am about to do now was going to happen anyway. It had been already decided. I have been preparing for this at length, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. It’s too long to explain it now. As you know, things just happen, that’s all. That’s life.”
“Why would Prosecutor Nisman write a message in a chat like the one he wrote to explain to a group of close friends the reason for his sudden return from Paris, and then commit suicide? A message in an almost epic tone, in which he stated that he was coming to fulfill a task “for which he had prepared at length, but which he did not expect to perform so soon,”Fernández de Kirchner wrote.
According to the New York Times, the day before his body was found, Nisman said he “might get out of this dead.”
Argentine journalist Damian Patcher, who broke the news of Nisman’s death, said he fled to Israel out of fear for his safety.
“I have no idea when I’ll be back in Argentina; I don’t even know if I want to. What I do know is that the country where I was born is not the happy place my Jewish grandparents used to tell me stories about,” he wrote for Haaretz.
What was Nisman alleging about the president and government officials?
Fernández de Kirchner also took the opportunity on Monday to dismiss Nisman’s claims her government was involved in a plan to protect Iranian officials from prosecution in connection with the AMIA attack.
In a criminal complaint filed Jan. 14, Nisman linked Fernández de Kirchner and other members of government to a purported deal that would protect Iranian officials alleged to be behind the 1994 car bombing that killed 85 people —one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever to take place in Argentina.
In return for not prosecuting the eight Iranian officials he accused in 2006 of orchestrating the attack — including former Iranian President Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Iranian cultural attaché Moshen Rabbani — Nisman alleged the Argentine government wanted Iranian oil to help ease the country’s energy deficit and to sell grain to the Islamic Republic.
Could Iran be involved in Nisman’s death?
Nisman, who was tasked in 2004 with investigating the AMIA attack by former President Nestor Kirchner, Fernández de Kirchner’s late husband, accused Iran of setting up a terror network in South America and the Caribbean and ordering the Jewish centre bombing.
According to The Telegraph, Nisman took the reins of the investigation after it “had been plagued by allegations of evidence suppression and bribery.”
An article published by The Daily Beast, a day after news of Nisman’s death broke, questioned the possibility of Iranian involvement and outlined past assassinations and assassination attempts pinned on Iran and its Lebanese benefactor Hezbollah.
“Was Alberto Nisman somehow caught up in this long war of assassinations? Or did he decide for reasons we probably cannot know to end his own life?” Foreign Editor Christopher Dickey wrote.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady made the same suggestion on Jan. 25, writing: “Tehran has more than 40 years of experience knocking off meddlesome individuals abroad and is now trying to allay global distrust as it bamboozles Barack Obama about its nuclear-weapons program. Nisman’s search for truth may have put a target on his back.”
Argentina’s spy agency in the spotlight
Fernández de Kirchner inferred rogue intelligence agents as being behind Nisman’s death, in a move against her government. Throughout a statement on Nisman’s death, she repeatedly mentions the name Antonio “Jaime” Stiusso.
Stiusso, according to the Guardian, was a wiretapping expert at the Intelligence Secretariat, whom Fernandez de Kirchner fired in December.
The Guardian‘s source said Fernandez de Kirchner also debated “replacing Nisman.”
Fernández de Kirchner didn’t blame Stiusso, but she accused the spy agency’s former General Director of Operations of being the one who provided Nisman with the purported evidence for his complaint. She also claimed the intelligence Nisman had in his report was false.
“It’s unreasonable to think our government could even be suspected of such a manoeuvre,” she said Monday evening.
With files from The Associated Press
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