BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman considered asking for the arrest of the country’s president, according to a draft warrant found at his apartment.
In the legal complaint found by police in a trash can at Nisman’s Buenos Aires apartment following his unexplained death two weeks ago, Nisman called for the arrest of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, who is Jewish.
Had the warrants been issued, “it would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” a political analyst, Sergio Berensztein, said in The New York Times.
Nisman seems to have ultimately decided to denounce Kirchner and her government but not seek her immediate arrest.
Nisman, 51, who was heading the probe into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center, was found shot dead in his apartment on Jan. 18 hours before he was to present evidence to Argentine lawmakers that Kirchner and other government officials covered up Iran’s role in the attack, which killed 85 and injured hundreds.
Clarin, the largest newspaper in Argentina, on Sunday reported the discovery of the draft warrant. The following day, Cabinet chief Jorge Capitanich in a news conference called the report a “lie and garbage,” ripping the article into several pieces in front of journalists and TV cameras.
On Tuesday, Clarin published a copy of Nisman’s draft warrant in which he requests the arrests of Kirchner and Timerman, and requires them to remain in the country.
The document, which asked for stronger measures against the president than the one that was to be presented finally by Nisman, is dated June 2014.
Anibal Fernandez, secretary general of the presidency, said Tuesday that “somebody” prepared the warrant for Nisman in the last hours before he was to present it and that the prosecutor just signed it.
Viviana Fein, the prosecutor investigating Nisman’s death, confirmed on Tuesday that Nisman had prepared the draft warrant, whose existence she had initially denied, according to The New York Times.
Fein reported on Monday that the single bullet that killed Nisman entered near his ear at the back of his head. The only DNA found at the crime scene was Nisman’s.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
