24 January 2015
The suspicious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman has reverberated nationally and internationally. Several news outlets in Latin America and around the world discussed the news and the continued advances in the investigation. There has been such shock provoked by the death of the man who accused the government of Argentina of reaching an agreement with Iran that those who were in contact with him at some point had theories about what might now happen.
Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, who was in frequent contact with Nisman professionally, referred to the “many doubts around what happened to this prosecutor” and issued a press statement.
Ros-Lehtinen worked with Nisman on the AMIA case: “We had a lot of ties with this prosecutor because we care a lot about Iran’s influence in Latin America,” she said in a conversation with AmericaTeVe “We were always in communication with him; he called us, we called him. We invited him to testify in Congress,” she further said.
The statement also recalls that in July 2013, President Cristina Kirchner “refused to let Alberto (Nisman)” travel to the United States to testify before the Congress. “For years I have being authoring legislation to condemn the attack on the AMIA and I mentioned Alberto’s reports in our resolutions. Alberto appreciated being mentioned in our press releases, fearing that people might forget these terrible atrocities of terrorism perpetrated by Hezbollah,” wrote the Cuban-American representative.
She not only referred to Nisman’s death, but in the same way as President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner she questioned whether the prosecutor killed himself: “I am very suspicious about this suicide because I knew him professionally. He didn’t seem to me to be a person who was depressed, who had that kind of problem,” she told AmericaTeVe, a website that had confirmed an interview with him over Skype for Monday, until he was found dead in his apartment in Puerto Madero.
“I extend my sincere condolences to Alberto’s family and friends. The people of Argentina have lost a great defender of the rule of law and a fighter against corruption and terrorism. (…) Under these mysterious circumstances, I urge that a transparent and neutral independent entity to hold a thorough investigation of the reality surrounding this death,” wrote the Congresswoman on her website.