Did 'rogue agents' lead to death of Argentine prosecutor?

The government says Nisman's allegations over the investigation of a 1994 bombing and his death were linked to a power struggle at Argentina's intelligence agency and agents who had recently been fired.

|
Marcos Brindicci/Reuters
A woman holds up a picture of late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman outside the AMIA Jewish community center during a demonstration to demand justice over Nisman's death in Buenos Aires, Argentina, January 21, 2015.

Argentina suspects rogue agents from its own intelligence services were behind the death of a state prosecutor investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment late on Sunday, a gunshot wound to his head and a 22 caliber pistol by his side along with a single shell casing.

He had been scheduled to appear before Congress on Monday to answer questions about his allegation that President Cristina Fernandez conspired to derail his investigation of the attack.

 His death and a blizzard of conspiracy theories around it have rocked Argentina.

 The government says Nisman's allegations and his death were linked to a power struggle at Argentina's intelligence agency and agents who had recently been fired.

It says they deliberately misled Nisman and may have had a hand in writing parts of his 350-page complaint.

"When he was alive they needed him to present the charges against the president. Then, undoubtedly, it was useful to have him dead," the president's chief of staff, Anibal Fernandez, said on Friday.

Argentine courts have accused a group of Iranians of planting the 1994 bomb, which killed 85 people.

Nisman claimed last week that President Fernandez opened a secret back channel to Iran to cover up Tehran's alleged involvement in the bombing and gain access to Iranian oil needed to help close Argentina's $7 billion per year energy deficit.

Fernandez's government called the accusation absurd.

Iran has repeatedly denied any link to the bomb attack.

The Argentine government's chief of staff said on Friday that he didn't believe Nisman even wrote his own report.

"I have worked quite a bit with prosecutor Nisman. I know he was a well qualified expert in the law. He could not have written this nonsense," he said. "It is totally clear he had nothing to do with it, but there were people around him who had a different agenda."

Although the government says there was a conspiracy to falsely accuse the president and then do away with Nisman, no one has been arrested in the case so far.

Officials initially said Nisman's death looked like suicide, but the lead investigator says it is suspicious and that all leads are being followed.

The head of Argentine intelligence was replaced in December, resulting in the firing of agents who had been helping with Nisman's investigation. Nisman had accused agents from another faction within the state intelligence apparatus of being part of Fernandez's alleged plot to clear the Iranian suspects.

One of those fired in the December shakeup was Antonio Stiusso, a senior spy who had helped Nisman with the probe.

The government says Stiusso falsely told Nisman that two men implicated in the case against the president were state intelligence agents. Wire tapped phone conversations of the two were key to Nisman's accusation that the government was trying to whitewash the 1994 car bombing.

President Fernandez said on Thursday that she did not believe Nisman took his own life.

"Nisman's accusation never was, in itself, the true operation against the government ... The true operation against the government was his death, after accusing the government," she said in a post on Facebook.

Those close to the late prosecutor have doubted from the beginning that he killed himself. Friends described him as upbeat ahead of his scheduled appearance before Congress on Monday.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Did 'rogue agents' lead to death of Argentine prosecutor?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2015/0123/Did-rogue-agents-lead-to-death-of-Argentine-prosecutor
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe