Murder Most Foul in Argentina A judge rules that a prosecutor investigating Iran was murdered.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/murder-most-foul-in-argentina-1514419543
Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was investigating President Cristina Kirchner’s links to Iran in January 2015 when he was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. Now a judge has ruled that he was murdered.
In 2015 Mrs. Kirchner’s secretary of security immediately declared Nisman’s death an apparent suicide. That made little sense to those who knew Nisman, in part because he was hours away from presenting evidence to Congress that Mrs. Kirchner had made a deal with Tehran to cover up Iran’s responsibility for the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people.
When President Mauricio Macri took office in December 2015 he pledged that investigators would have the independence to discover the truth. The Journal reported in September that “twenty-eight government forensic experts, toiling at a secret facility for seven months, concluded” that Mr. Nisman was killed. They handed their findings to a federal court.
On Tuesday in a 656-page opinion, Argentine federal judge Julián Ercolini ruled that “the death of Prosecutor Nisman was not a suicide, and was brought about by a third party and in a painful manner.” He charged Diego Lagomarsino, who was an aide to Nisman, as an accessory to the murder.
The judge says Mr. Lagomarsino was the last person in the apartment and the bullet that killed the prosecutor came from the aide’s gun. Mr. Lagomarsino denies any role in Nisman’s death and says his boss asked him for the gun for protection.
Nisman is being vindicated in death. His thorough investigation led to the indictment of Mrs. Kirchner on treason charges earlier this month. As a sitting senator she has immunity for now but her former foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, is under house arrest. Let’s hope investigators keep following the trail to Tehran.
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