By Joshua Keating, 4 February 2015
The mystery surrounding the death of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman took an explosive twist on Tuesday when it was reported that a formal request for the arrest of the country’s president and foreign minister were found at his house. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the story, in part because it’s just one facet of an even larger 20-year-old mystery. But here’s the basic outline, plus some theories for how Nisman died:
In 1994, the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was bombed, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds in the country’s worst ever terrorist attack. No one has ever been convicted of the attack, but since the beginning, heavy suspicion has focused on Hezbollah and its patron, Iran. The AMIA attack followed a bombing at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier, which was claimed by the Hezbollah-allied Islamic Jihad Organization.