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Argentina: WSJ editorial on NIsman

The perfect title: Murder Most Foul in Argentina

In 2015 Mrs. Kirchner’s secretary of security immediately declared Nisman’s death an apparent suicide. That made little sense to those who knew Nisman, in part because he was hours away from presenting evidence to Congress that Mrs. Kirchner had made a deal with Tehran to cover up Iran’s responsibility for the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people.

When President Mauricio Macri took office in December 2015 he pledged that investigators would have the independence to discover the truth. The Journal reported in September that “twenty-eight government forensic experts, toiling at a secret facility for seven months, concluded” that Mr. Nisman was killed. They handed their findings to a federal court.

On Tuesday in a 656-page opinion, Argentine federal judge Julián Ercolini ruled that “the death of Prosecutor Nisman was not a suicide, and was brought about by a third party and in a painful manner.” He charged Diego Lagomarsino, who was an aide to Nisman, as an accessory to the murder.

Will justice win?

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Argentina: Nisman was murdered

Three months after a panel of experts confirmed that Alberto Nisman was murdered, federal judge Julián Ercolini ruled on Tuesday that Mr Nisman’s gunshot wound could not have been self-inflicted.

Mr Ercolini also charged a former aide to the prosecutor, Diego Lagomarsino, as an accessory to murder.

Mr Lagomarsino was the last person in Mr Nisman’s apartment and the bullet that killed the prosecutor was fired by Mr Lagomarsino’s gun, the judge said.

Commentary thread at Twitter,

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Argentina: Experts’ report confirms Nisman was murdered

Via Mary O’Grady,

The official report from a team of forensic experts states that prosecutor Alberto Nisman was murdered. He was first beaten by two people and drugged with ketamine, which had not been previously detected.

Among the injuries from the beating, Nisman’s nose was broken.

According to the report, Nisman died at 2AM on Sunday, January 18, 2015 in the bathroom of his apartment.

Times of Israel:

Twenty-eight experts in different areas, from ballistics to psychology, determined that Nisman was murdered by a shot to the head, and that the murderer (or murderers) then attempted to cover their tracks at the scene of the crime, according to a report in the Argentine news site Infobae.

[link to Infobae article in Spanish]

The Tower:

The report also highlighted that only two footprints belonging to Nisman were found in his Puerto Madero apartment. This finding is inconsistent with Nisman’s activities on previous days, suggesting that the suspect or suspects carefully cleaned Nisman’s apartment before they left to cover any tracks.

Lastly, experts explained that the position and angle of the gunshot are not compatible with that of a self-inflicted wound, making it physically impossible for Nisman to have committed suicide that way.

The report was submitted to prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, now in charge of the case.

However,
Nisman: the Gendarmeria Boffins Report (emphasis added)

Taiano has requested that Ercolini order a reconstruction of the murder in Nisman’s actual flat. The flat has long since been rented out to someone else. The someone else in question doesn’t have any choice about cooperating with a federal judge but the paperwork might take time. What will happen then is that the gendarmes will act out their hypothesis with Ercolini and his staff present. It’ll be filmed as well. So when that’s done and not before Ercolini will decide whether he accepts the report of the gendarmeria experts.

Read the rest.

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Argentina: Did Iran poison Nisman?

The WSJ editorial board asks,
Nisman and the Iranians: Did the Islamic Republic poison an Argentine prosecutor? (emphasis added)

Monday that a new toxicology analysis on the body of the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has discovered the drug ketamine, an anesthetic mostly used on animals. It is highly unlikely Nisman would have voluntarily ingested such a drug. He had been investigating Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center when he was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound to the head in January 2015.

“There is a mountain of evidence in the case that indicates that it is a homicide; this would be one more,” said Mr. Sáenz, who worked to get the case moved to federal court last year so he could take over the probe.

In 2006 Nisman indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the bombing, which killed 85. At the time of his death Nisman was a day away from testifying before the Argentine Congress about his more recent findings. He alleged that then-President Cristina Kirchner and her foreign minister Héctor Timerman had made a deal with Tehran to bury the matter in return for Iranian oil and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Read the whole article.

I’ve been posting on this story for years: read the files here.

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Argentina: #Nisman was murdered

Alberto Nisman was found dead from a shot in the head in his Buenos Aires apartment on January 18, 2015.

His death has now been declared a murder:

Nisman was found dead one day before he was due to present a complaint to the Argentine Congress accusing leading politicians, including former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, of colluding with Tehran to cover up Iranian culpability for the atrocity. A team of investigators appointed by the Kirchner government concluded — following a controversial investigation that was heavily criticized by Nisman’s family — that the special prosecutor committed suicide using a gun supplied to him by Diego Lagomarsino, a computer specialist employed by Nisman.

But a new report from the Gendarmeria, a federal security force, will put the suicide theory to bed once and for all and show that Nisman was murdered, according to Argentine news outlets. The report’s publication is expected within the next thirty days, the Clarin newspaper said.

Eamonn MacDonagh asserts that this is a major development; long-time readers of this blog know that the case was being investigated as a suicide.

Much as Nisman himself experienced when he began investigating the accusations that President Kirchner had engaged in a cover-up of Iran and its Hezbollah proxy’s responsibility for the AMIA bombing, [prosecutor Eduardo] Taiano has also received threats and warnings not to pursue his inquiries. One text message he received in December last year told him to “stop f__g about with that son of a b__ Jew,” a reference to Nisman, and added, “your days are numbered.”

The complaint Nisman had been due to announce would have implicated Kirchner, former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other officials in negotiating a secret pact with the Iranians to absolve Tehran of the AMIA bombing. Nisman’s tenacious investigation — including a log of more than 4,000 monitored phone calls — strongly suggested that in doing so, Kirchner and her colleagues were trying to cover their tracks.

The article points out that “MacDonagh cautioned that numerous “legal roadblocks” could still be placed in front of the Nisman investigation.”

On her part, Cristina Kirchner announced that she’s willing to run for senator. It’s not clear whether, if elected, the post would grant her immunity from prosecution on any charges related to the Nisman murder case itself, or from charges arising from Nisman’s investigations.

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Argentina: Cristina tweets on Nisman’s case against her

No, not on the investigation of Nisman‘s murder, but on the civil lawsuit Nisman brought against her:
Cristina Criticizes Attempts To Reopen Nisman’s Case Against Her. Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took to Twitter to criticize further attempts to reopen a case that Prosecutor Alberto Nisman opened against her.

In a barrage of Tweets today, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner criticized yet another attempt to reopen a case investigating whether she covered up the role Iran could have allegedly played in the deadly 1994 AMIA bombing. The bid to reopen the case has already been rejected, but Cristina took to Twitter nonetheless to blame the Macri administration for instigating it.

Why, pray tell?

On January 18th 2015, Nisman was found dead in his apartment with a single gunshot to the head. It’s still unknown whether this was a suicide or homicide. He was set to appear before Congress to justify calling Cristina to the stand mere hours after he was killed.

Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas dismissed the case against Cristina in 2015. Then, in March, Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita requested reopening the case, but according to Rafecas, the case was already “closed and archived” and could not be opened again. Once the judiciary returns from recess next week, La Nación sources revealed days ago that a double strategy will be implemented. First, the DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas) will ask for Judge Rafecas to de-archive the case. Second, Federal Chamber Prosecutor Germán Moldes will try to get the ruling that closed the investigation annulled.

We’ll see how this all turns out.

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Argentina: New prosecutor in Nisman investigation

Argentine prosecutor asks to reopen Nisman case. New government voids deal with Iran on investigating AMIA bombing, reviving suspicions of Kirchner cover-up

A federal prosecutor has asked an Argentine court to reopen the complaint filed by the late special prosecutor Alberto Nisman charging that former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing.

The prosecutor, Raul Plee, filed a request Monday to reopen the case with the Federal Criminal Cassation Court.

On Monday, just after the new government voided the Argentine pact with Iran to jointly investigate the AMIA attack, Plee asked the justices to analyze new information collected during the case about the unconstitutionality of the Iran memorandum with an eye toward reviving Nisman’s theory that the pact was a bid to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing.

According to the state-run news agency Telam, Plee wrote in his request that during hearings about the unconstitutionality of the pact, the Foreign Ministry presented “secret and confidential” documents that could be considered useful to reactivate Nisman’s accusation against Kirchner, her Jewish former foreign minister Hector Timerman, and others.

The prosecutor asked that the secret and confidential files be sent to prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita and to the judge, Daniel Rafecas. Pollicita was the prosecutor who took over Nisman’s accusation after his death and presented it to the court in February. Rafecas dismissed the accusation, saying it could not be sustained by the evidence.

More in Spanish, here.

The prior prosecutor, Viviana Fein, has treated the case as a possible suicide, not a possible murder.



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Latin America: Packrat malware targeted #Nisman

Huge, years-long, malware attack on the political opposition and the independent press in the ALBA countries,

Revealed: Mystery 7-year cyberspy campaign in Latin America. Bogus propaganda websites punt malware to likely marks (emphasis added)

Security researchers have uncovered a seven year-long malware campaign against Latin America.

Citizen Lab found that journalists, activists, politicians, and public figures in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have been targeted by a large-scale hacking campaign since 2008.

The campaign, dubbed Packrat, uses bogus websites and social media accounts for fake opposition groups and news organisations in order to distribute malware and conduct phishing attacks.

The attackers, whom we have named Packrat, have shown a keen and systematic interest in the political opposition and the independent press in so-called ALBA countries (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), and their recently allied regimes. These countries are linked by a trade agreement as well as a cooperation on a range of non-financial matters.

Security tools firm AlienVault uploaded Citizen Lab’s findings on Packrat to its threat-sharing platform OTX in order to warm the general community of the emerging threat and its indicators of compromise. Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary lab focused on global security.

Not only Nisman was hacked, but also Lanata,

The security researchers caught the scent of the Packrat attackers in Ecuador this year before tracing their nefarious activities back to attempts to compromise the devices of Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor known for doggedly probing a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing, and investigative journalist Jorge Lanata in Argentina last year. Further work revealed a pattern of systematic electronic spying dating back to 2007.

Hacked has more,

A Sophisticated Hacker Operation
John Scott-Railton, the lead Citizen Lab researcher at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, said the operation is highly targeted. He said Packrat carefully chooses and relentlessly pursues its targets.hacker

The hackers used the same Internet domains for years even though there was some exposure in doing this, a technical convenience. Cybercriminals normally do not do this for fear of being caught by law enforcement.

The researchers found 35 types of booby-trapped files and used domains hosted by companies in the U.S., Uruguay, Sweden, Spain, France, Brazil and Argentina.

About two dozen “seeding” sites resided on servers owned by GoDaddy.com LLC, a U.S.-based web hosting company, for much of the past two years. GoDaddy-hosted domain names included login-office365.com, mgoogle.us, update-outlook.com and soporte-yahoo.com.

Researchers alerted most of the providers Friday and asked that they shutter Packrat’s known infrastructure. Nick Fuller, a GoDaddy spokesperson, said GoDaddy acts immediately after identifying a problem website.

Packrat Targeted Nisman
The researchers started the investigation after determining that Packrat had targeted Nisman, who died mysteriously of a gunshot wound in January while attempting to bring charges against Argentina’s president.

Researchers said Packrat sent Jorge Lanata, an Argentine journalist, the same virus Nisman received a month prior to his death.

The virus was designed to communicate with the same Internet domains used to spy on Ecuadorean opposition figures who found Packrat malware in their emails using search scripts the researchers wrote.

Not that it’ll make any difference on the Nisman murder investigation – that’s not going anywhere.

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