A federal prosecutor has asked an Argentine court to reopen the complaint filed by the late special prosecutor Alberto Nisman charging that former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing.
The prosecutor, Raul Plee, filed a request Monday to reopen the case with the Federal Criminal Cassation Court.
On Monday, just after the new government voided the Argentine pact with Iran to jointly investigate the AMIA attack, Plee asked the justices to analyze new information collected during the case about the unconstitutionality of the Iran memorandum with an eye toward reviving Nisman’s theory that the pact was a bid to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing.
According to the state-run news agency Telam, Plee wrote in his request that during hearings about the unconstitutionality of the pact, the Foreign Ministry presented “secret and confidential” documents that could be considered useful to reactivate Nisman’s accusation against Kirchner, her Jewish former foreign minister, Hector Timerman, and others.
The prosecutor asked that the secret and confidential files be sent to prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita and to the judge, Daniel Rafecas. Pollicita was the prosecutor who took over Nisman’s accusation after his death and presented it to the court in February. Rafecas dismissed the accusation, saying it could not be sustained by the evidence.
Nisman was found dead on Jan. 18, hours before he was to present his allegations to Congress against Kirchner, Timerman and others. Whether his shooting death was murder or self-inflicted has yet to be determined.
Also Monday, during a ceremony in which he officially took office, the new president of the DAIA Jewish political umbrella, Ariel Cohen Sabban, said the circumstances surrounding Nisman’s death “should be clarified.”
“We demand a full clarification of this crime, which is surrounded by doubts and unanswered suspicions,” he said in his first speech as DAIA president.
Cohen Sabban is the first Orthodox Jew to head the Argentine Jewish political umbrella in its 80-year history.
