By Taos Turner, 15 May 2015
BUENOS AIRES—Early in the morning of Jan. 19, a phone rang in Sandra Arroyo Salgado’s room at the Saint Dominique Hotel in Paris. It was the bodyguard of Alberto Nisman, Argentina’s best-known prosecutor and the father of her two children. Mr. Nisman, he told her, had been found dead in his apartment of a gunshot to the head.
The horror had scarcely sunk in before she frantically began phoning Argentine officials. As a federal judge in that country, Ms. Arroyo Salgado was well acquainted with what could go wrong with police investigations. She wanted to stop the autopsy from happening before she got back to Buenos Aires.
The judge had every reason to be suspicious. Mr. Nisman, her former longtime companion, was hours away from going before Congress to accuse Argentina’s president of conspiring to cover up Iran’s alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people. Mr. Nisman had received numerous death threats.