(JTA) — Citing independent forensic tests, Alberto Nisman’s ex-wife said the late AMIA case prosecutor was murdered.
“Nisman didn’t have an accident. He didn’t commit suicide. They murdered him,” Sandra Arroyo Salgado said at a press conference Thursday, without elaborating on who killed the 51-year-old prosecutor who was found dead at his Buenos Aires home on Jan. 18.
Salgado, herself a federal judge, said that experts came to this conclusion by analyzing an autopsy and other forensic evidence.
Nisman, who was Jewish, was found dead hours before he was to present evidence to Argentine lawmakers that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
Argentine authorities initially released forensic findings that suggested that Nisman may have committed suicide. On Jan. 30, the prosecutor in charge of investigating Nisman’s death said that no one else’s DNA was found at the scene of the crime.
Salgado’s announcement comes one day after Fernandez de Kirchner published a full-page advertisement in eight Argentine newspapers arguing that Nisman’s 350-page complaint about the government’s handling of the AMIA investigation is “filled with contradictions, illogical, with no legal basis.”
Fernandez de Kirchner had originally called Nisman’s death a suicide but now refers to it as a deliberate “operation against the government.”
Salgado had called for an international investigation into Nisman’s death last month.
The AMIA bombing, which was the worst terror attack on a diaspora Jewish institution since World War II and came two years after an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, killed 85 people. Since his death in January, many people in Argentina have described, Nisman, who was appointed prosecutor for the investigation in 2004, as AMIA’s 86th victim.
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