A Very Argentinian Mystery

On Sunday, January 18th, Natalio Alberto Nisman, a fifty-one-year-old federal prosecutor, was found shot dead inside his locked Buenos Aires apartment. There was a gun nearby, and a bullet wound to his head. Nisman had spent the past decade investigating Argentina’s worst-ever terrorist attack—the 1994 car bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA, which killed eighty-five people. A few days earlier, he had released a report alleging that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had engaged in a massive cover-up of Iran’s role in the AMIA case in exchange for trade concessions. In order to investigate the case, Nisman also repudiated a 2013 memorandum of understanding signed by Timerman and his Iranian counterpart. He had been due to present evidence in the National Congress on Monday, the day after his body was discovered.