AMIA Investigator Judge 'May Have Been Forced to Commit Suicide'

A year and a half after the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, the judge investigating the bombing of the Argentine Jewish center, senior judicial officials in Argentina have raised the possibility that Nisman was 'forced to commit suicide.' According to The Guardian and Associated Press, Viviana Fein, the Argentine prosecutor, expressed this possibility for the first time during an interview with the local radio station 'La Red' on Thursday night, May 30. Fein was responsible for the investigation into Nisman’s murder until six months ago. Nisman’s body was found in January 2015 in an apartment in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. For years, Nisman had been investigating the deadly bombing at the Argentine Jewish center and in the last weeks of his life, he accused then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of colluding with the Iranian government to 'cover up' Iran's role in the bombing. Nisman had written in his investigations that Kirchner had made commitments in agreement with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government to take actions aimed at diverting the investigation from the correct path. In the 1994 explosion at the AMIA building, the Argentine Jewish community center was destroyed; 85 people were killed and nearly three hundred were injured. Nisman’s body was found with a bullet in his head in a bathtub just hours before he was scheduled to testify in the Argentine Senate about the accusations he had made against the then-President. After Nisman’s murder, the Argentine prosecutor stated that he had issued an arrest warrant for Kirchner. Following Nisman’s death, Kirchner claimed that 'rogue agents' had deliberately provided Nisman with false information with 'political motives' against her government to lead him to 'incorrect' conclusions. Kirchner also emphasized that her government had no connection to Nisman’s murder. Shortly after Nisman’s death, both the initial court and then the Supreme Court of Argentina deemed the accusations against Kirchner as 'unfounded' and dismissed them. Kirchner's eight-year presidency ended six months ago. Mauricio Macri, the president elected in December 2015, annulled the agreement made between Kirchner's government and Iran. Meanwhile, last week, former President Carlos Menem claimed that elements in the country had 'killed' his 21-year-old son in connection with this case, but he did not name them. Menem had also been accused of receiving millions of dollars in bribes from Iran to 'cover up' the investigation into the AMIA explosion, but he vehemently denied the allegations until the end of his presidency. Argentine Jews, who had protested for years against the 'diversion of the investigation,' have pressured their government over the past year and a half to investigate Nisman’s murder, who was also Jewish. Additionally, last year, an Argentine journalist claimed that his life was in 'danger' due to publishing information regarding Nisman’s murder investigation and fled to Israel.