Chief investigator Viviana Fein, probing the likely murder of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman last Jan. 18, has announced that she found a draft detention request against Argentine President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, AP reported. The document was discovered in a trash bin of the apartment where Alberto Nisman’s body was discovered.
Nisman’s body was found in his bathroom, dead from a gunshot wound, hours before his scheduled appearance before a Congressional committee to discuss his allegations against President Kirchner.
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The warrant accused the president of shielding the Iranian perpetrators of the 1994 terror bombing of a major Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Kirchner has denied these allegations.
Chief investigator Fein noted that the arrest request was not included in the complaint filed by Nisman in federal court a few days earlier.
According to The Week, the Argentine news outlet Clarín—no friend of President Kirchner—first reported the existence of the arrest warrant near Nisman’s body last Sunday. But Fein doubted the veracity of the report, until she finally confirmed it on Tuesday.
Fernandez Kirchner’s government and Clarin have been on the war path for years, and, according to AP, the Nisman case is serving as the background for a showdown between these two mortal enemies. The president has been trying for years to break up Grupo Clarin, which is one of the biggest media conglomerates in Latin America.
For now it does not appear that the discovery of the damning document will change the course of Fein’s investigation significantly. The chief investigator, while acknowledging the existence of the draft document, and admitting she had made an error of “terminology and interpretation, ” went on to minimize the importance of the warrant in proving who killed Nisman.
“The words I should have used are: ‘I know that there was a draft'” of a document, she argued, and added that its existence “is not important enough to change the course of the investigation.”
Nisman was afraid of being assassinated, and was assigned 10 federal policemen to protect him. All 10 have been suspended, but for now they are not considered suspects officially.
