By Charles Newbery
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said Thursday that she is convinced Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who last week accused her of criminal activities, did not commit suicide as she originally suspected.
“The suicide (I’m convinced) was not suicide,” the president wrote on her personal blog.
Her change of mind came three days after she posted on Facebook that Nisman, who was found Sunday shot in the head in his apartment, probably killed himself, an assessment shared by other officials.
New evidence came to light Wednesday, however, with the discovery of a third entry point into Nisman’s 13th-floor Buenos Aires apartment through an air duct used for servicing the building’s air conditioning system. A fingerprint and footprint were found near the passageway leading to the adjacent door apartment.
Also Wednesday, the locksmith who opened the door for Nisman’s mother and police officers to search for the prosecutor, said the door was open and it took him just a couple of minutes to get inside, a job that anybody could have done.
In her more than 2,800-word post Thursday, Fernandez de Kirchner raised questions about what happened immediately after Nisman's body was found in the bathroom.
“How was a private doctor allowed to enter the area where the body of prosecutor Nisman was found before reporting to the judge, his superiors and the forensics on the scene?” she asked.
The president also laid out a new theory that Nisman may have been fed with “false information” for making the accusation against her and others, including two suspected Secret Service agents.
Nisman said Jan. 14 that the president orchestrated a plot to try to cover up Iran’s alleged involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. In exchange, Argentina wanted to trade grains for oil and natural gas from the Republic.
Instead of upholding the accusations, she said Nisman’s report produced “nothing new.”
She added that she suspects the accusation was not the goal of the conspirators behind the false information, but Nisman’s subsequent death.
“They used him while he was alive, then they needed him dead,” she wrote. “It’s that sad and terrible.”
Fernandez de Kirchner’s popularity has dropped below 30 percent this year on a sluggish economy, high inflation and rising speculation of corruption. That’s far less than the 54 percent of the votes that won her a second term in 2011, fueling expectations that her party will lose the October presidential election after 12 years of rule.
In further details, the president said the spies listed in Nisman’s allegations were never members of the Intelligence Agency, leading her to suspect Antonio “Jaime” Stiusso, a veteran intelligence agent working with the prosecutor on the bombing case, may have been the one feeding false information.
“Personally, I believe that he did more than that,” Fernandez de Kirchner wrote, adding that the planting of the information was “buried with the death of the prosecutor. That is, as an apparent suicide, a method that has been used in many infamous cases.”
In separate comments, the president’s secretary general, Anibal Fernandez, said he never said he suspected suicide, adding in comments to the press, “Things are getting stranger all the time.”
Viviana Fein, the prosecutor probing Nisman’s death, said the president can write what she wishes, and “I will attend to my investigation.”
Fein has declared the death as “suspicious” and said that she will investigate the possibility that threats could have led Nisman to kill himself.
Sergio Berni, the federal secretary of security, also amended his initial hypothesis of what happened. Berni was on the scene when Nisman’s body was found, and said at first it was likely suicide. Now with the new evidence, he said on Radio La Red, “The theory of suicide is ever further away.”
In other new evidence, Diego Lagomarsino said in comments published in Pagina/12, a newspaper, that he loaned the caliber 22 pistol to Nisman the night before his death.
Lagomarsino, who repaired the computers at Nisman’s office, said Nisman asked him for the gun because he feared for his life.
Nisman told him that this fear stemmed from a phone call from Stiusso on Friday, who told the prosecutor to watch out for himself and that he didn’t trust his bodyguards, a cartel of 10 police officers, and that he should beef up the security for his two daughters.
