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Argentina: #Nisman could not have shot himself

Alberto Nisman could not have killed himself, ballistics tests show. The prosecutor investigating Argentina’s worst-ever terrorist attack was shot dead by someone else

In the latest twist to the case, a series of tests carried out in a laboratory in the northern Argentine city of Salta have shown that the gun that killed Nisman would have left traces of gunpowder on the hand that pulled the trigger. Tests done on Nisman’s hands in the days following his death found no such residue.

However,

Viviana Fein, who is leading the investigation into Nisman’s death, said the latest tests cannot be fully accurate because they cannot recreate the crime scene. “We can’t take one piece of proof in an isolated way,” she said.

Knowing on which side her bread is buttered (emphasis added),

The prosecutor said her findings will not be published until after the October general elections, when Mrs Kirchner will have to step down after serving two terms.

Meanwhile, the Money laundering investigation is moving forward at a faster clip.

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Argentina: #Nisman’s killer washed his hands in the sink

While the official investigation drags on, the latest:

EXPERT WITNESS USES ANIMATION TO PROVE ARGENTINE PROSECUTOR NISMAN WAS MURDERED

An expert witness brought to trial by the family, Daniel Salcedo, presented evidence this week proving that Nisman could not have killed himself and made the blood stains found in his bathroom.

. . .

Salcedo told the chief prosecutor in the Nisman case, Viviana Fein, that bloodstains in the bathroom could not have been made by Nisman because of the angle at which he fell. The stains, he argued, were “almost half a meter above where the victim’s head was found.” In addition, he noted that no bloodstains were found under the sink, only above it. Had Nisman shot himself and fell to the floor under the sink, it is to be expected that some blood would splatter there.

Salcedo used a digital animation to make his point. His evidence will be taken into consideration, though the federal police have ruled out homicide.

More:

Salcedo also presented Fein with a digital animation sequence to back his murder hypothesis, noting that the blood stains slanted downward and began at a height of 60 centimeters (23.5 inches), or almost 50 centimeters (20 inches) above the spot where the victim’s head was found, the daily said Tuesday.

The expert said the alleged killer was standing behind Nisman and to the right, while the prosecutor was down on one knee by his bathtub.

The blood stains could have occurred when the purported killer shook his hands before washing them, Salcedo said.

Federal Police experts and an expert hired by the defense team of Diego Lagomarsino are ruling out the existence of another person inside Nisman’s apartment.

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Argentina: Cristina, Iran, #Nisman, and The New Yorker and The Tower reports

Six months ago, prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead of a bullet to the head on January 28 in his Buenos Aires apartment, on the eve of the day when he was scheduled to testify to congress on his findings regarding a civil lawsuit he had filed the week prior accusing president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of colluding with Iran to obscure the investigation into the 1994 AMIA bombing.

Nisman’s civil lawsuit was dismissed.

The investigation into his murder is still pending.

Three days ago, president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner tweeted a transcript and video of her interview with The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins,

Cristina may have been hoping for a puff piece like Vogue magazine’s infamous profile of Asma al-Assad.

Filkins met her at the Quinta Olivos, asked questions, and let her talk (which she did – boy, did she ever, for over two hours).

Rather than a puff piece on the self-absorbed Cristina, Filkins wrote an excellent article on the Nisman case,
Death of a Prosecutor
Alberto Nisman accused Iran and Argentina of colluding to bury a terrorist attack. Did it get him killed? This is what Filkins had to say about his conversation with Cristina,

Pesident Kirchner works in an ornate mansion in central Buenos Aires known as “the Pink House”—for the tint of its walls, once supplied by horse blood—but her official residence, in a northern suburb, is called Quinta de Olivos. Dating to the sixteenth century, Olivos, as it is known, is a white three-storied palace that resembles an enormous wedding cake.

When I met Kirchner there, two months after Nisman died, the mystery was still dominating the news. I was ushered into a wide split-level room that had been set up as a television studio. Kirchner entered a few minutes later, in a flouncy dress and heavy makeup, followed by two dozen aides, nearly all of them men. With the cameras running, Kirchner reached over, before the interview began, to fix my hair. “Is there some girl who can help him with his hair?” she asked. “We want you to be pretty.” Then she began to straighten her own. “I want to primp myself a bit,” she said. “Excuse me, I’m a woman, besides being the President: the dress, the image—”

“Divine!” one of her aides called from off the set.

While Filkins did not refute any of Cristina’s lies, his is not a puff piece at all,

Over time, Kirchner has grown more dictatorial and, according to muckraking reports, more corrupt.

The article must be read in its entirety.

Likewise, Eamonn MacDonagh reports at The Tower on Alberto Nisman’s Secret Recordings, Revealed
Before he was murdered, the Argentinian prosecutor investigating the massive 1994 Buenos Aires bombing wiretapped over 40,000 phone calls. His one question: Did the Argentinian government conspire to cover up Iran’s involvement in the attack?

An idea of the importance of the recordings can be gleaned from a February 2013 conversation between alleged Argentine government intelligence operative Ramón Héctor “Allan” Bogado and Khalil. In that call, which was widely reported in the Argentine press, Bogado told Khalil, “We have a video of the [AMIA] attack,” leading Khalil to reprimand him for not being more careful when speaking on the phone. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure who Bogado meant by “we,” but one distinct possibility may be that the AMIA bombing was filmed by Argentina’s intelligence services, or that a video recording of it, perhaps containing vital evidence about the identity of the terrorists who carried out the attack, fell into their hands.

Both Filkins’s and MacDonagh’s articles are indispensable reading on the Nisman case.

Investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, in his show Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism For All), continues his coverage of the Nisman murder, and commissioned forensic expert Cyril Wecht for his opinion on whether Nisman’s death was a murder or a suicide. You can watch the report here.

Wecht’s interview starts 35 minutes into this YouTube; the show is in Spanish but Wecht’s portion is in English,

One of the world’s foremost forensic experts, Wecht asserts that Nisman’s death is most likely a murder.

Which comes as no surprise.

Also in Lanata’s report: The man in charge of internet security at Nisman’s apartment building has been in charge of cyber defense for Argentina’s military since January.

Tom Clancy would have had a field day.

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Argentina: Who went into #Nisman’s laptop?

In today’s WSJ:
New Twist in Death of Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman
Officials probe whether someone logged onto prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s computer after his mysterious death
The WSJ calls it “mysterious death,” I call it murder.

Kejal Vyas reports,

The new development in a case that has roiled Argentina since Mr. Nisman’s death in January is being investigated by Viviana Fein, the prosecutor who is trying to determine if the 51-year-old killed himself or was the victim of foul play. Mr. Nisman’s Samsung laptop logged the input of up to three flash drives just after 8 p.m., Ms. Fein told Argentine media on Monday, some hours after a .22-caliber Bersa was held to his head and discharged.

Investigators are looking into whether the computer—which contained data from his investigation of Iran’s suspected role in a 1994 terror bombing in Argentina—was accessed locally or remotely and whether its time registry could have been changed.

Here’s the mind-boggling video shown in Jorge Lanata’s show,

Vyals also mentions,

A new book by Mr. Nisman’s cousin, Andrea Garfunkel, launched fresh accusations that the late prosecutor was killed because of his investigation into the 1994 bombing. Ms. Garfunkel highlights irregularities regarding the findings at Mr. Nisman’s home. She notes the unused pajamas found near his bed, which she says suggests he may have died the night before investigators found him.

The book, In memoriam, is available for Kindle from Amazon in Spanish.

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Argentina: Crime scene video from #Nisman apartment

Argentinian journalist Jorge Lanata played in his TV show the following video:

In it, State Security chief Sergio Berni, while at the apartment of the presumably very dead Alberto Nisman, went to prosecutor Viviana Fein who was recording the findings at the scene, and asked her whether they should first verify the state of the person in the bathroom, “in case he was in agony.”

Nisman’s own mother had already been at the scene, and he was clearly dead.

The investigation had been botched up from the start. Lanata has more video (which apparently had been edited by the authorities) showing how evidence was handled by numerous people who were not wearing rubber gloves, the murder weapon was wiped to show its registration number, Fein stepped in the blood on the bathroom floor, and on and on.

One would compare them to the Keystone Kops, but there’s no need to insult the Kops.

Departing question:
Incompetence, yes; willful or not?

Related: “Silence is health”

UPDATE:
Linked to by Power Line Picks. Thank you!

Linked to by Grouchomarxistas. Thank you!

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Argentina: On with slandering the Jews in the AMIA & #Nisman cases

Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman resigns from both the AMIA and the DAIA, while endorsing Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that the Jewish communal organizations aim to destabilize her government:
Argentine Foreign Minister Turns on Jewish Leaders as AMIA Controversy Deepens

The endorsement by a Jewish politician of Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that Jewish communal organizations are trying to destabilize her government is a genuine gift for Argentina’s professional anti-Semites. They include individuals like , a Buenos Aires lawyer who has launched a private prosecution against AMIA and DAIA, alleging that both have engaged in treason. Labaké, an advocate of the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the AMIA bombing, is basing his charges on Fernández de Kirchner’s remarks, which were in turn grounded on the original accusation by Jorge Elbaum, a former director of AMIA and a government loyalist, that AMIA, DAIA and Nisman’s supposed subversion was being financed by the American hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has been locked in a separate legal battle with the Argentine authorities.

Just as anti-Zionist Jews provide a protective layer against charges of anti-Semitism directed at the BDS movement, men like Elbaum and Timerman perform much the same service on behalf of Fernández de Kirchner. Indeed, Timerman’s decision to openly turn on AMIA and DAIA brought forth an angry denunciation from Dr. Shimon Samuels, the international director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In an email to journalists, Samuels declared: “By this personal act, [Timerman] has rejected his Jewish education values and destiny – among them burial in a Jewish cemetery – and has, apparently, abandoned the Argentine victims of this Tehran-sponsored aggression,” a reference to the evidence uncovered by Nisman that Iran was behind the AMIA atrocity.

At the same time, Argentina to compensate victims of 1994 Jewish center bombingPayment is to be made to the 300 injured and to the families of the 85 people killed in the attack, which Israel accuses Iran of ordering and Hezbollah of carrying out. The decision came about after Ruth Tenembaum, the widow of one of the 85 people murdered in the 1994 attack, had pursued the case in court for nearly a decade.

Considering Argentina’s record of not default, I wonder how long – if ever – will it take to collect.

Whether the survivors collect or not, as Ben Cohen of The Tower points out,

neither that acknowledgment [of Argentina’s failure to protect the AMIA building from a terrorist attack] nor the compensation will lead to any convictions in either the AMIA bombing or the Alberto Nisman case.

Cohen refers us to read Eamonn McDonagh’s posts on the Nisman murder, pointing to Lagomarsino.

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Argentina: Hitting new lows on the #Nisman murder

Cristina Fernandez’s administration’s approach to Alberto Nisman is two-pronged:
1. Get the case Alberto Nisman filed a few days before his murder dismissed from the courts.
2. Engage in a full-spectrum smear campaign against Nisman.

The Washington Post has an editorial on #2, which now includes anti-Semitism:
Argentina’s president resorts to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

WHAT DO lobbyists at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the director of a Washington think tank have to do with hedge-fund manager Paul Singer and the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who died mysteriously in January? Well, according to Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, they are all part of a “global modus operandi” that “generates international political operations of any type, shape and color.” They “ ‘contribute’ to financial attacks or simultaneous international media operations, or even worse, covert actions of various ‘services’ designed to destabilize governments.”

Cristina’s accusations, titled Everything has to do with everything when it comes to geopolitics and international power, first posted at her official website, are now missing, but The Guardian listed some of them:

Fernández says Nisman told leaders of the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations (Daia): “If necessary, Paul Singer will help us.” This is alleged to have happened two years ago when Nisman lobbied the body – which represents the country’s Jews – to mount a legal challenge a memorandum of understanding between Argentina and Iran.

Nisman and his supporters alleged that the memorandum was part of a conspiracy to cover up Iran’s involvement in the bombing in exchange for a trade deal – a charge denied by both Iran and Fernández.

The president’s allegations that Singer supported her critics were based on an article in the government-friendly newspaper Página 12 by Jorge Elbaum, a former executive director of Daia. Elbaum claimed Singer was funding opposition to the Iran-Argentina deal in Buenos Aires and Washington. The report says Singer also donated $3.6m between 2008 and 2014 to the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a thinktank whose executive director, Mark Dubowitz, claims to be a friend of Nisman’s.

Fernández said she saw parallels between these activities and the Israeli government’s support for US members of Congress who aimed to block the recent US-Iran nuclear deal. In both cases, she said lobbyists and covert agencies organised financial attacks and media smear operations designed to destabilised governments.

Not only was Cristina’s original article erased from her official website, she did not bother to present any evidence (in court or elsewhere) to any of her accusations.

And, just this week, prosecutor Javier De Luca asserted that, when it comes to Nisman’s case, “There has been no crime.”

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