By Charles Newbery

BUENOS AIRES

A high-ranking justice official said Thursday that Alberto Nisman was assassinated, a new twist in a year-old case to find out what happened to the federal prosecutor.

Nisman “was a victim of homicide”, Ricardo Saenz, attorney general for the national criminal appeals court in Buenos Aires, wrote in a request for the federal courts to intervene in the case.

The prosecutor was found dead last January, four days after accusing then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of trying to cover up Iran’s alleged involvement in a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

The whitewash ploy was designed to improve bilateral trade ties in exchange for hiding the alleged involvement of former Iranian officials in the worst terrorist attack in the country that killed 85 victims, Nisman said before his death.

Nisman was found with a gun wound to his head in the bathroom of his apartment, one day before he was to give evidence before Congress about his claims.

Until now, the case has been investigated by lower-level courts, which have followed the lead of “suspicious death”.

The judge overseeing the death probe, Fabiana Palmaghini, has refused to elevate the case to the federal level.

Even so, Nisman’s former wife, the federal judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, hired a forensics team to study the evidence and produce an autopsy report that concluded death resulted from homicide.

Among other things, the forensics team determined Nisman’s body had been moved and that his time of death could have been a day earlier than officially believed.

The case, however, stalled in Palmaghini’s court, even after a massive rally to demand justice for Nisman and for the investigation into the cause of the 1994 bombing to move forward.

Saenz was a leader of the protest and has continued to seek justice for Nisman.

In his 11-page request, he said the federal court in Buenos Aires “has the broadest jurisdiction to hear and decide which of all the assumptions involved is finally fact”.

Saenz brought up contradictory statements by those questioned in the case, as well as claims by Nisman’s wife that the prosecutor's apartment had been cleaned of fingerprints and content on the his computer and mobile phone had been deleted.

The Criminal Court said it will hear Saenz’s suggestions March 18 before making a decision on how to proceed. “We are extremely satisfied,” Arroyo Salgado’s lawyer, Manuel Victorica, said on TodosNoticias, a cable news network in Buenos Aires.

He said his client “has maintained from the start that Nisman was killed”, pointing out the lack of gunpowder on the victim’s hands even though the gun found in the bathroom had powder.

“He didn’t shoot the gun. It was shot by a third person, and it was an assassination,” Victorica said.

The new twist in the case is a sign of how the new government of President Mauricio Macri, who took office in December, is letting the justice system take action.

His predecessor had spoken widely about the case but it was often to defend her administration against Nisman’s claims. Macri, on the other hand, has met with Nisman’s two daughters since taking power.

“The change of command in the presidency has allowed the case to move forward,” political analyst Carlos Germano told Anadolu Agency.

“The best thing for Macri to do is to not get involved but to let the justice system act independently and in its own time.”

He said this will not only show the court’s independence but also keep Fernandez de Kirchner in the spotlight of the case as she ponders her next move after eight years in office. “This won’t do her political career any good,” Germano said.