BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman was murdered as a direct consequence of his accusation against former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of a cover-up of Iran’s role in the1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing, a federal court ruled.
The Argentinean Federal Chamber of Appeals on Friday backed the federal judge who is leading the investigation, Julian Ercolini, who ruled last December, more than two years after Nisman death, that it was a murder and not a suicide.
On Jan. 14, 2015 Nisman sued the president at that time, claiming that Kirchner and other officials of the government decided to “not incriminate” former senior officials of the Islamic Republic and tried to “erase” their roles in planning the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and hundreds wounded due to an agreement with Iranian officials.
Four days later Nisman’s body was found in his apartment, with one shot in his head, just hours before he was to present evidence to Argentine lawmakers that the government covered up Iran’s role in the bombing.
According to this upper-level court, in the current investigation “there are clues with sufficient importance to sustain as a hypothesis that the destiny of Nisman … was decided as a consequence of the nature, seriousness and scope of the complaint filed a few days before,” wrote judges Martín Irurzún and Leopoldo Bruglia.
The court confirmed the original murder ruling by Ercolini and his indictment of the security officials who were tasked with protecting Nisman at the time of his death. In that December ruling, the judge also charged Diego Lagomarsino, a former IT employee of Nisman’s, as an accessory to murder.
The Federal Chamber of Appeals also urged the judge to continue “with the speed and seriousness that such a grave fact imposes.”
