Buenos Aires, Argentina: Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor whose mysterious death has gripped Argentina, had drafted a request for the arrest of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, accusing her of trying to shield Iranian officials from responsibility in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Centre in Buenos Aires, the lead investigator into his death said Tuesday.
The 26-page document, which was found in the garbage at Nisman’s apartment, also sought the arrest of Hector Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister. Both Kirchner and Timerman have repeatedly denied Nisman’s accusation that they tried to reach a secret deal with Iran to lift international arrest warrants for Iranian officials wanted in connection with the bombing.
The new revelation that Nisman had drafted documents seeking the arrest of the president and the foreign minister illustrates the heightened tensions between the prosecutor and the government before he was found dead on January 18 at his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. He had been scheduled the next day to provide details before Congress about his accusations against Kirchner.
“It would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst, said about the effect of the arrest requests if they had been issued.
He noted that previous legal cases had shaken Argentina’s political establishment, but he emphasised that this case involved a request to arrest a sitting president. “It would have been a scandal on a level previously unseen,” Berensztein said.
Kirchner, who is on a visit to China, issued a stream of updates on Twitter about strengthening ties between Buenos Aires and Beijing, but did not comment immediately on the confirmation that Nisman had considered seeking her arrest. She and the foreign minister have previously pointed to statements by Interpol’s former director that the Argentine government did not lobby it to lift the Iranian arrest warrants.
“It is totally baseless, the accusation of Mr. Nisman,” Timerman said before the reports emerged that the prosecutor had considered seeking his arrest and that of Kirchner. “Why didn’t he call Interpol to see if it was true? He didn’t.”
The draft of the arrest requests was not included in the 289-page criminal complaint against Kirchner, the foreign minister and prominent supporters of the president that Nisman filed before his death. Nisman accused them of derailing his decade-long investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association, commonly called AMIA, which left 85 people dead.
In his criminal complaint, Nisman accused Kirchner and a group of her supporters of covering up a secret outreach effort to the Iranians, describing it as an attempt to derail his investigation, and he asked for their assets to be frozen.
Normally, a prosecutor in Argentina seeks an arrest out of concern that the people charged with crimes will try to corrupt the investigation or flee the country, according to Susana Ciruzzi, a professor of criminal law at the University of Buenos Aires who knew Nisman.
But in this case, some legal experts suspect that Nisman decided against requesting the arrest of Kirchner because such a move would have been viewed as a political attack on the president in a case that has already polarised the nation.
Moreover, Kirchner and Timerman have immunity as members of the executive branch. They could have been arrested only if a judge handling the case were to authorise a political trial similar to an impeachment process and ask Congress to lift their immunity, Ciruzzi said.
Two judges have refused to take the case put forward by Nisman, raising the possibility that his criminal complaint could languish in Argentina’s legal system if another judge is not found to continue it. A federal chamber is expected to decide who should take the case.
Kirchner and senior officials have disputed Nisman’s findings, contending that agents from Argentina’s premier intelligence services were involved in preparing his complaint. In the uproar around the prosecutor’s death, Kirchner announced a plan last week to overhaul the intelligence agency, after a purge of its leadership in December.
As the investigation into Nisman’s death continues, theories are swirling in Argentina about whether it was a suicide or a killing. Kirchner has suggested that his death was part of a plot to tarnish her government.
