Who Will Obtain Justice for Alberto Nisman?

Who Will Obtain Justice for Alberto Nisman?

(Photo: wikicommons)

In yesterday’s Daily Dispatch, we noted the suspicious death of Alberto Nisman, the Jewish-Argentinian prosecutor who had long pursued justice for the 85 people killed in the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center. The Times of Israel’s David Horovitz writes about Nisman’s tireless investigation the bombing, the damning evidence against Iran and Hezbollah he found, and says that all decent people should be appalled at Nisman’s death:

We know all of this because of the indefatigable investigative work of one man, Alberto Nisman, who 10 years ago took over the investigation of the bombing. It was Nisman who traced the evidence, in what remains the worst-ever terrorist attack in Argentina, all the way back to that meeting of the Iranian leadership in Mashad.

So definitive and persuasive were Nisman’s conclusions that Interpol placed the key Iranian conspirators, along with Imad Mughniyeh, on its international watch list, requiring member countries to assist in their arrests and extradition …

Last week, Nisman, 51, alleged that the current Argentinian president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Nestor’s widow), and her Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, had worked to cover up Iran’s involvement in the attack. He said he sought to question her over the scandal.

On his first visit to Israel seven years ago, Nisman, a non-observant Jew, told me that he had been warned off the AMIA case by Iran, and that he had received death threats, including one that he found recorded on his home answering machine which was particularly troubling because his daughter was standing next to him when he played it. In one of several subsequent telephone conversations, he said the Iranians had told him — during hearings at which they sought in vain to have their incriminated leaders cleared by Interpol — that he had slandered their nation, that his capture would be sought, and that he would spend years in Iran’s jails.

As I wrote at the time, Nisman did not appear particularly fazed by the threats, saying lightly that he had no plans to visit the Islamic Republic. He also swore that he would not cease his work on the case until the perpetrators and orchestrators had been tried, convicted and jailed.

Alberto Nisman was found dead on Sunday in a pool of blood, with a gunshot wound to his head, in his home in Buenos Aires. It was hours after the death of Imad Mughniyeh’s son Jihad, who had followed his father’s bloody footsteps, in an Israeli strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. And it was hours before Nisman had been set to speak to a congressional panel about his latest allegations against President Kirchner.

Hearing the news on Monday morning, I could not help but recall what Nisman told me in a June 2013 telephone conversation: Tehran had established its terror networks for the strategic long term, he said, ready to be used “whenever it needs them.” In that same call, he warned that terrorist networks first established by Iran in several South American countries in the 1980s and 1990s were still in place. As throughout his investigation into the AMIA bombing, Nisman said he continued to receive intermittent death threats, by phone and email. “I report them to the authorities,” he said simply.