A year after the mysterious death of star prosecutor Alberto Nisman shookArgentina to the core and made headlines around the world, the case may finally be moving closer to a solution.
A judicial attempt to rule out the suggestion that Nisman’s death was suicide and the appearance in court of a former spymaster who could provide clues in the case suggests that the stalled investigation may inching towards a conclusion.
Nisman was found shot dead in his home last year just hours before he was due to appear before Congress to explain his accusations that thenpresident Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had conspired to cover up Iran’s alleged involvement in a 1994 terrorist attack in Buenos Aires.
The death remains unsolved, and until last week, authorities had not even decided whether to define it as homicide or suicide. On Thursday, however, federal appeals court prosecutor Ricardo Sáenz said that “the evidence produced so far” showed that Nisman had been the victim of a homicide.
Sáenz agreed with Nisman’s family that the absence of gunpowder on Nisman’s hand has ruled out the possibility of suicide.
“Scientific tests lead to the indisputable conclusion that the weapon that produced Nisman’s death leaves residue from the shot up to 20 hours after being fired, while no particle characteristic of a blast was found on the victim’s hands,” Sáenz wrote in the document which was submitted to the court in support of a lawsuit launched by Nisman’s family.
Nisman’s supporters have long alleged that the prosecutor was killed in an attempt to derail his investigation into the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which left 85 dead and hundreds wounded.
“Nisman was murdered and it was state policy [under Fernández] not to investigate it,” said Waldo Wolff, a Jewish community leader and legislator for the Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition of the country’s new centre-right president, Mauricio Macri.
No comments:
Post a Comment