MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cristina Fernandez adds yet another conspiracy chapter to Nisman's death

”Conspicuous and suggestive” that some sectors “are trying to accuse the (current) government that has done the most... to solve the AMIA case” of obstructing justice

The usually verbose Argentine president Cristina Fernandez preferred a lengthy letter in Facebook to comment on special prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death (suicide), arguing it was yet another tragic chapter of the ongoing confusion, question and lies that have surrounded for 21 years the AMIA case.

 “A suicide prompts, in all cases, shock and questions. What drives a person to take the terrible decision to take his own life?” the president wrote. Interestingly enough, the head of state then placed doubts about this statement in the following paragraph.

“In the case of the suicide (?) of the prosecutor in charge of the AMIA case, Alberto Nisman, there is not only shock and questions — but also a story too long, too heavy, too hard and above all things too sordid.”

After a lengthy digression, Fernandez refers to the judges that presided over the 1994 AMIA case, and the cover up investigation that followed, including magistrates Juan José Galeano, Claudio Bonadío and Ariel Lijo, plus political figures such as former president Carlos Menem and his head of intelligence services at the time among others.

The president underlined that in effect as lawmaker she was a member of the congressional committee that for years collected information, true, false and misguided, about the attack that killed 85 and injured 300. And it was only now that based on that, that an oral trial had been anticipated for next June.

“Today, after almost 15 years and 12 magistrates who excused themselves from the case, the oral trial is ‘likely’... to begin in June of this year.”

The president said it was “conspicuous and suggestive” that once the (long overdue) oral trial for cover up is about to begin, some sectors “are trying to accuse the (current) government that has done the most... to solve the case” of obstructing justice, in reference to Nisman's accusations of an alleged plot by the Cristina Fernandez government to exonerate the Iran connection.

The head of state insisted that the Memorandum of Understanding sealed with Iran in 2013 is “the only way to unlock the investigation,” which has been blocked for almost 21 years.

The Argentine president insisted that sectors she did not mention were trying to “divert, lie, cover up and confuse” the population.

“While in (the original AMIA trial) the cassettes proving the SIDE (intelligence) was aware that an attack was being planned disappeared, now we see new cassettes ‘appearing’ with statements from people who openly backed Iran, and whose views on the issue were evident without the need for a wire tap,” she wrote.

“Who ordered Nisman to return to the country on January 12, leaving her little daughter on her own at the Barajas airport (in Madrid), interrupting his family holidays?”

Finally, the president blamed Clarin newspaper for setting up a number of front pages firing off a crescendo of accusations against her administration. The Facebook post ended with the image of three Clarin front pages.

Earlier in the day the head of Argentina's Intelligence Secretariat Oscar Parrilli said that “following on specific orders from President Cristina Fernandez” the agency will declassify data relating to intelligence personnel implicated in the wiretaps related to the 1994 AMIA bombing investigation.

In effect the agency informed judge María Servini de Cubria that it would arrange “the declassification of the identity, actions, events and circumstances relating to intelligence personnel that arise from the recorded telephone calls”.

The declassification of information related to Argentine intelligence workings, connections with other services, and names had been requested by prosecutor Nisman in anticipation of his attendance to an unofficial congressional committee where he promised to give evidence in support of the charges brought against President Cristina Fernandez, foreign minister Timerman and other close members of her administration.