The Slatest

Argentine President Suggests Prosecutor Was Manipulated, Murdered by Spies

Nisman’s mother after meeting this week with the prosecutor investigating her son’s death.

Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead of a gunshot wound last Sunday after accusing President Christina Kirchner’s government of covering up Irans involvement in a 1994 terrorist bombing. Kirchner’s administration has denied the allegations, and some of her allies initially suggested Nisman had committed suicide. Retaliatory murder was also an obvious possibility given Nisman’s high-stakes charges against powerful figures. Now Kirchner’s government has gotten behind a third theory: that Nisman was manipulated by intelligence service figures who funneled him slanderous information about the Kirchner regime and then killed him. From Reuters:

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.

Kirchner herself posted a letter online that made similar points, writing that the “real operation against the government was the prosecutor’s death.”