The ex-wife of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, found dead in his apartment the day before he was to testify to that nation’s Congress against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, claims she received an image of her ex-husband with a strange hole in his head two days before his death.
Nisman’s ex-wife, Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, was in Europe at the time, according to reports in Argentina’s La Nación. Nisman, she says, sent her an advance photo of a copy of the magazine Noticias, in which a profile of Nisman was the cover story. Their daughter also reports having received the photo from Nisman.
Upon seeing the photo Nisman sent her via Whatsapp, she used the application to speak to her current partner and ask him to send her a photo of the copy of Noticias she thought would be at their home. Her partner, La Nación reports, bought the magazine at a newsstand, not having found it in their mail. He sent her a photo of Nisman in the magazine–one that appears on the inside of the publication. In the image Arroyo Salgado received, Nisman had a hole in his head.
Infobae has not only confirmed the existence of the photo, but published it on its pages:
Two days later, Nisman was found dead with a gunshot wound in his forehead.
The profile in Noticias, titled “Secrets of the Prosecutor Who Wants to Convict the President,” is only available inside the magazine, but Noticias has published its cover, which uses the same photo as that sent to Arroyo Salgado. She told Infobae she remains uncertain whether the photo is related to his death, and admits that she “gave no mind” to the image when she first received it.
Nisman had been working on an almost 300-page report detailing how the President’s administration had worked to protect the orchestrators of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center–the deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history–to establish favorable trade deals with Iran. The men involved in the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Society are believed to be Iranian and have ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah.
While his death was initially ruled a suicide, Fernández de Kirchner herself took to her personal website to write a long blog post in which she insisted that Nisman’s death was a murder, and that “those” who had convinced him that she was involved in criminal dealings with Iran “needed him dead.” She has not specified whom she believes those individuals are, though others in her administration have blamed former intelligence officials, and she herself has dissolved Argentina’s national intelligence agency over the matter.
Fernández de Kirchner, who is currently in China attempting to strengthen diplomatic ties with that nation, has yet to remark upon the arrest warrant against her found in Nisman’s apartment this week.