Ten years since Nisman’s death: doubts, services and mystery so that everyone can choose their own version

Ten years since Nisman’s death: doubts, services and mystery so that everyone can choose their own version

On January 18, 2015, hours before appearing before Congress to give details about his complaint for Iran’s cover-up, federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment in Puerto Madero. From that moment, doubts and mystery surrounded the case, which was soon linked to intelligence agents and SIDE inmates.

Ten years after the death, the Prosecutor’s Office in charge of the case is trying to justify the hypothesis that it was a murder linked to his complaint against former president Cristina Kirchner for the signing of the Memorandum with Iran for the attack on the AMIA – which voted Congress -, and advances in the analysis of the role of intelligence services in the days before and after the night of January 18, 2015.

Nisman was found in the bathroom of his house with a bullet in the head, coming from a weapon that hours before had been provided to him by the only defendant in 10 years of case: the computer technician Diego Lagomarsino.

LAGOMARSINO AND THE LACK OF EVIDENCE OF THE ALLEGED MURDER OF NISMAN

«They accuse me of being part of a plan in which I gave a gun to someone knowing that they were going to kill Nisman. But we don’t know when or how or where,” he said. @lagrancaruso in #TheMorning by @AM750.… pic.twitter.com/VUsp2A7S6j

— Victor Hugo Morales (@VHMok) January 17, 2025

After advancing the hypothesis of suicide, with the changes in government, federal prosecutor Eduardo Taiano redirected the investigation under the premise that Nisman was the victim of a homicide and his death “was motivated by his work in the UFI-AMIA and, specifically, with his actions linked to the Memorandum of Understanding with the Republic of Iran. However, until now it has not been possible to determine with evidence “the identity of those who carried out the act and those who ordered it.”

That January 18, at 10:32 p.m. and after a locksmith opened one of the doors of the apartment in the Le Parc towers, Nisman was found dead in the bathroom of his bedroom, shot in the head – more precisely in the hundred – and the weapon used at the scene. In both hands he had traces of a primer, which remain as a vestige of firing a firearm.

Four days before, on January 14, 2015, he had returned from a trip especially to present a complaint in the middle of the judicial fair against the then president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, officials of her government and others implicated in the aggravated cover-up of the attack on the AMIA in following the signing of the Memorandum with Iran in 2013, later declared unconstitutional by Justice.

The Prosecutor’s Office is now trying to denounce irregularities at the scene of the incident that night and early morning of Monday, January 19, 2015, the apathy of the four guards assigned to Nisman that weekend and the intelligence activity by former agents of the AFI and now, also, the Army.

According to Lagomarsino’s story, Nisman asked him for the gun because he feared for his safety. The computer technician, who worked for the prosecutor recommended by someone in intelligence, reported having received a call from Nisman asking him to go to his house, at which time, according to what he said, he asked him for a weapon.

“However, as a result of evidentiary measures carried out within the framework of the investigation, this version of the events was distorted, since the communications were initiated by Lagomarsino himself, resulting in this action being part of the plan to simulate the suicide,” understands the prosecutor’s office in a report released on January 8.

Helpful hands

The investigation is making progress in unraveling the link between “inorganic” intelligence agents who sold information and what happened, and to this end the prosecution requested and obtained this week an extension of the declassification of files and access to “all documentation, files and/or information held or recorded by any agency that is part of the National Executive Branch regarding Nisman and his work as prosecutor of the UFI-AMIA.

Tato Young is not even the slightest bit K and is one of the highest-paid media operators of Macri’s regime; Well, even Tato Young admits that Nisman cheated so as not to end up in trouble…I repeat, not Navarro or Duggan, Tato Young… pic.twitter.com/TkVFUdczHC

— @caidodelcatre (@caidodelcatre2) January 12, 2025

For the journalist specialized in intelligence issues Gerardo Young, from the Clarín group, it was “a suicide” and the complaint that he was going to file for the memorandum with Iran “was an intelligence folder from (Jaime) Stiuso”, head of the area of Counterintelligence of the SIDE for decades.

According to Young, Nisman “worked under an operations specialist such as Jaime Stiuso. “He owed a lot to Stiuso, including the position of his wife, (the federal judge of San Isidro) Sandra Arroyo Salgado.”

Another piece of information that caught attention at the beginning of the investigation was the discovery of bank accounts abroad, precisely in the United States, in the name of his mother, Sara Garfunkel, and his sister Sandra. There, US$600,0000 were discovered.

The days before death

On January 14, 2015, Nisman filed a criminal complaint against then-president Cristina Kirchner, part of her cabinet and close figures, for the alleged cover-up of the perpetrators who carried out the terrorist attack against the AMIA headquarters.

Specifically, he denounced the existence of an agreement carried out “through both official and parallel channels, by the highest authorities of this country and the Iranian regime, with the aim of guaranteeing impunity for those who were – and continue to be – the accused. of having committed and masterminded the maximum terrorist attack that occurred in our territory, achieving his disassociation from the process carried out as a consequence of it.

In this sense, Nisman indicated that, although the maneuver began its gestation in the period between the last months of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, it materialized on January 27, 2013 with the celebration of the Memorandum.

Thus, the prosecutor denounced that the chosen mechanism created a “Truth Commission” that ultimately allowed the impunity of the accused to be guaranteed by delegitimizing the investigation into the terrorist attack and the authorities that intervened in it, distorting the evidence produced and enabling the possibility of redirection towards new culprits.

The complaint for the signing of the Memorandum – which was initially archived and was “revived” with the changes in government – will finally reach an oral trial after last December the Supreme Court of Justice rejected appeals from the accused, including the former president, and cleared the way for progress towards the debate that will be prepared during 2025 and then set a start date.