Argentinian court will now treat Alberto Nisman's death as a homicide investigation

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Argentinian court will now treat Alberto Nisman's death as a homicide investigation

Judge passes the dramatic case to federal court as a potential homicide,
citing a former spy chief’s testimony that Iran was possibly involved

Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires
Tuesday 1 March 2016 20.18 GMT

The Argentinian judge overseeing the investigation into the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman has announced that she is passing the case to a federal court to be treated as a homicide investigation.

Judge Fabiana Palmaghina’s announcement came just hours after a former operations chief of the country’s disbanded spy agency testified in court that Alberto Nisman had been murdered because of his work.

Until now, Palmaghina had pursued the hypothesis that Nisman had killed himself, but in her ruling – made public on Tuesday afternoon – she cited a section of testimony by former spy chief Antonio Stiuso in which he suggested that Iran was involved in Nisman’s death.

“With the Iranians, it’s irrelevant whether or not you have bodyguards, because if you are a target, they study you, they study and get to know your movements. Having bodyguards is pointless when these people are your enemy,” Stiuso said during his appearance at a 17-hour appearance at a closed court on Monday.

“(Nisman’s) death was intimately linked to the work he was doing,” he said, according to a transcript of the judge’s ruling.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/01/argentina-judge-passes-case-of-alberto-nisman-death-to-federal-court

[MinM]

1. Person of Interest

There was throwaway line at the end of an episode in season 1 of Person of Interest about Iran being behind the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing.

Alberto Nisman, along with many others, were heavily invested in that narrative...

article | posted January 18, 2008 (web only)

Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

...Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation...

In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors [font color=blue]Alberto Nisman[/font] and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They [font color=darkred]visited Detroit, Michigan[/font], where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.

In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing...

Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.

Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."

A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter

[bemildred]

2. The story has the otherworldly stupidity that makes me think of Neocons.

It reeks of stretching to reach a foregone conclusion. And the lack of evidence after all this time reeks too. One suspects the investigation is the objective, the idea is to just use it as a propaganda tool forever.