The government of Argentina announced today that “rogue” intelligence agents are suspected in the death of state prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who before his death had formally accused President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of sabotaging an investigation into Iran’s role in a deadly terror attack.

Reuters reports:

Argentina suspects rogue agents from its own intelligence services were behind the death of a state prosecutor investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. …

The government says Nisman’s allegations and his death were linked to a power struggle at Argentina’s intelligence agency and agents who had recently been fired.

It says they deliberately misled Nisman and may have had a hand in writing parts of his 350-page complaint.

Nisman died of a gunshot wound to the head the day before he was was scheduled to present evidence at a congressional hearing in Buenos Aires in support of his allegations that Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman were trying to absolve Iran of its involvement in the 1994 bombing.

The government’s claim of “rogue agents” closely matches that of Kirchner, who asserted Thursday that a former intelligence chief had “disposed” of Nisman, when he no longer was of use.

The Times of Israel reports:

“I’m convinced that it was not suicide,” Kirchner said in a letter posted on her Facebook page about the suspicious death of Nisman, who investigated the 1994 suicide attack on the AMIA Jewish community offices in Buenos Aires, which left 85 people dead. …

Kirchner seemed to allege Thursday that Nisman had been fed false information by ex-intelligence chief James Stiusso, who had then disposed of him. “They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead. It is that sad and terrible,” she wrote, according to the Buenos Aires Herald.

However, Kirchner is also another potential beneficiary of Nisman’s death.

The New York Times on Wednesday reported on the details of the criminal complaint Nisman compiled against Kirchner, alleging she had attempted to make a deal to absolve Iran of its complicity in the AMIA bombing in return for Iranian oil.

But the intercepted telephone conversations he described before his death outline an elaborate effort to reward Argentina for shipping food to Iran — and for seeking to derail the investigation into a terrorist attack in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people.

The deal never materialized, the complaint says, in part because Argentine officials failed to persuade Interpol to lift the arrest warrants against Iranian officials wanted in Argentina in connection with the attack.

The phone conversations are believed to have been intercepted by Argentine intelligence officials. If proved accurate, the transcripts would show a concerted effort by representatives of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government to shift suspicions away from Iran in order to gain access to Iranian markets and to ease Argentina’s energy troubles.

The report in the Times comes one day after a judge released Nisman’s complaint.

Armin Rosen of Business Insider rounded up some of the emerging evidence that supports the suspicion that Nisman was killed:

Nisman’s death was tentatively being considered as a suicide, with the jurist felled by a single bullet wound to the head and clutching the gun that killed him. But there are indications that it was something much more sinister.

The lack of an exit wound suggested the fatal shot was fired at a further distance than Nisman could have managed had the wound been self-inflicted. His last WhatsApp message was a photo of stacks of documentation related to the next day’s testimony, and Nisman had apparently given his maid a grocery list for the following week. A 10-person government security detail was reportedly pulled off of his apartment the night of his death. Most damningly, there was no gunpowder residue found on Nisman’s hands, physical evidence that he didn’t discharge a firearm prior to his death.

Rosen observed that no matter at whose hand Nisman died, “the Iranian regime benefits.”

Interpol “red notices” have been issued for seven past and present officials of the Iranian regime, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was president at the time of the AMIA bombing. Rafsanjani is often referred to as a “moderate” and is considered a mentor to current president Hassan Rouhani.

In an analysis written for The Tower yesterday, Eamonn MacDonagh, a writer based in Argentina, criticized the government’s reaction to Nisman’s death and the revelations in the late prosecutor’s criminal complaint.

[W]e who live in Argentina are filled with an enormous sense of sadness and rage. We have to try to come to terms with the fact that that we live in a country where a state prosecutor can die in mysterious circumstances just days after making grave accusations against the President and Foreign Minister. The reaction from the authorities has been bluff and bluster. In the case of the President, she released one rambling missive long on conspiracy theories and personal reminiscence, and short on compassion and the taking of effective measures to restore public confidence in the administration of justice. Now she’s produced another—equally self-referential and bizarre in tone—in which she suggests that Nisman was murdered on the instructions of his foreign masters in order to create a scandal damaging to her and to her government.

The coming days will tell us whether we live in a democracy—flawed but a democracy nonetheless—or a mafia state where local and foreign intelligence services do their grim work with the connivance of the highest authorities in the land—and where Jewish citizens can be slaughtered with almost no one being called to account.

[Photo: Antena 3 Noticias / YouTube ]