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In Alberto Nisman Case, a Body, a Pistol and Few Answers in Argentina
Investigations differ on whether death of prosecutor who accused president was murder or suicide
Alberto Nisman, Argentina’s best-known prosecutor, was found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound to the head in January. ENLARGE
Alberto Nisman, Argentina’s best-known prosecutor, was found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound to the head in January. Photo: MARCOS BRINDICCI/REUTERS
By
Taos Turner And
Reed Johnson
May 15, 2015 1:30 p.m. ET
52 COMMENTS
BUENOS AIRES—Early in the morning of Jan. 19, a phone rang in Sandra Arroyo Salgado’s room at the Saint Dominique Hotel in Paris. It was the bodyguard of Alberto Nisman, Argentina’s best-known prosecutor and the father of her two children. Mr. Nisman, he told her, had been found dead in his apartment of a gunshot to the head.
The horror had scarcely sunk in before she frantically began phoning Argentine officials. As a federal judge in that country, Ms. Arroyo Salgado was well acquainted with what could go wrong with police investigations. She wanted to stop the autopsy from happening before she got back to Buenos Aires.
The judge had every reason to be suspicious. Mr. Nisman, her former longtime companion, was hours away from going before Congress to accuse Argentina’s president of conspiring to cover up Iran’s alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people. Mr. Nisman had received numerous death threats.
Judge Arroyo Salgado was wary of leaving it to authorities to figure out what had happened. So she launched her own probe.
“I need to know the truth to explain this to my daughters,” she said in a recent interview.
The rival investigative teams have helped turn the case into a whodunit that has gripped the nation. They have failed to agree even on such basic facts as the time of death. Nor has there been any resolution to the most important question: Was Mr. Nisman assassinated or did he commit suicide?
Judge Arroyo Salgado didn’t succeed in postponing the autopsy. The lead government investigator said almost immediately that the autopsy report was “categorical” in determining that Mr. Nisman took his own life with a borrowed .22 caliber Bersa pistol. Two tests, however, showed Mr. Nisman’s supposed trigger hand didn’t bear traces of gunpowder.
Judge Arroyo Salgado’s team didn’t buy the suicide scenario. It suggested in a 93-page report that Mr. Nisman was murdered, shot from behind while he was on one knee by his bathtub. The report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said chemical testing showed someone may have washed away blood from a faucet near Mr. Nisman’s body, although a repeat test by the judge’s team later cast doubt on that.
Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, the former longtime companion of Mr. Nisman, in April before she met with authorities investigating his death. ENLARGE
Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, the former longtime companion of Mr. Nisman, in April before she met with authorities investigating his death. Photo: Xinhua/Zuma Press
The judge says authorities wouldn’t let her team test for blood elsewhere or test the pistol that killed him. She also claims authorities bungled the case from the start, allowing scores of people, including journalists and a top government security official, to taint the scene by walking around without protective gear. At one point, she says, Mr. Nisman’s distraught mother was even asked to tidy up by doing some dishes.
Nearly four months after Mr. Nisman’s death at the age of 51, there still are more questions than answers. Polls show most Argentines believe he was murdered, but few believe the case will ever be solved.
“If the investigation ends up determining this was a murder, people won’t believe it. If it says he committed suicide, nobody will believe that either, because all of this has been so messed up—and continues to be so messed up,” says Luis Kvitko, an Argentine forensic doctor and international crime-scene consultant who isn’t involved in the case.
Public reaction has moved from shock and outrage about Mr. Nisman’s death to disgust and cynicism about the nation’s judicial system. While Argentine courts have long been political, under President Cristina Kirchner they have become a polarized battleground. Her critics accuse her of packing courthouses and prosecutors’ offices with loyalists. The president, who is scheduled to leave office in December, has said the judiciary needed to be purged of vested interests.
Last month, a prosecutor shelved the investigation into Mr. Nisman’s allegations that Mrs. Kirchner had conspired to cover up Iran’s alleged role in the 1994 bombing, the worst anti-Semitic attack since World War II. The prosecutor, Javier De Luca, is a member of Legitimate Justice, a pro-Kirchner group of lawyers and judges.
Mr. De Luca made the decision, which he said was based strictly on the letter of the law, despite calls from two other prosecutors and a judge to start a formal investigation. Legal experts said that, barring an unprecedented appeal to the Supreme Court, the move likely is the end of the road for Mr. Nisman’s allegations.
The investigation of his death, however, grinds on. A panel of experts appointed by the lead investigator is evaluating the murder and suicide theories and trying to settle the question once and for all.
The roots of the saga reach back to a July morning in 1994, when a suicide bomber parked a Renault truck outside the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association and detonated it, leveling the six-story community center. The probe dragged on for a decade. In 2004, then-President Néstor Kirchner, who preceded his wife, Cristina, in office, put Mr. Nisman, a descendant of Holocaust survivors and victims, in charge of the probe.
Mr. Nisman built a case that Hezbollah agents, in league with Iran, were responsible. Argentina was chosen, he concluded, because it was a “soft” target with a large Jewish community.
In 2006, Mr. Nisman and another prosecutor brought formal charges against Iran’s former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, four other top ministers and three officials from the Iranian embassy in Argentina. Iran has denied responsibility, as has Hezbollah.
Mr. Nisman also came to believe—although he didn’t say so publicly for many months—that Mrs. Kirchner spearheaded a coverup of Iran’s alleged role as part of a never-realized grain-and-beef-for-oil deal with the revolutionary Islamic regime.
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By that time, a movement had begun to change the makeup of the nation’s judiciary. Legitimate Justice, the pro-Kirchner legal group, believed the courts were too subservient to a conservative Argentine establishment that opposes Mrs. Kirchner’s legislative agenda. About 30% of the nation’s prosecutors and 10% to 15% of its judges are members or are sympathetic to the group, according to the group’s president, Judge María Laura Garrigós.
Mrs. Kirchner pushed through legislation making it easier to appoint and impeach judges. The Supreme Court subsequently struck down one of her laws as an infringement of judicial independence. Still, Argentina ranks 127 out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum ratings on judicial independence.
This year, on Jan. 14, Mr. Nisman went public with his explosive claims, filing a criminal complaint accusing Mrs. Kirchner, her foreign minister and others of obstruction of justice.
Mr. Nisman said thousands of intercepted phone calls involving associates of the president and a suspect in the bombing had implicated her in a coverup. The government’s motive, he alleged, was to align itself with countries resistant to U.S. power, such as Venezuela and Iran, and to gain access to Iranian oil.
“It’s as if Bush negotiated with bin Laden impunity for al Qaeda,” Mr. Nisman wrote to one acquaintance in a Jan. 14 WhatsApp message.
Argentina’s government strongly denied the charges. Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister, said in an interview he believes Iran was responsible for the bombing but that there was no coverup.
Four days after Mr. Nisman dropped his bombshell, on the night before he was scheduled to elaborate on his allegations before Congress, his body was found in a pool of blood in his bathroom, with the Bersa pistol nearby.
At first, Mrs. Kirchner echoed the early suggestion by the lead investigator that Mr. Nisman had killed himself. But three days later, she reversed herself, writing on her Facebook page that she thought the prosecutor was murdered in a plot to discredit her government.
The lead investigator, Viviana Fein, backed away from her suicide suggestion and said she was open to all hypotheses. She has said little in public lately, except to defend herself from Judge Arroyo Salgado’s accusations of incompetence and mendacity. Ms. Fein declined to comment for this article, as did the prosecutor, Mr. De Luca, and Mrs. Kirchner.
Judge Arroyo Salgado, an energetic woman who lived with Mr. Nisman for 17 years before they separated in 2011, was allowed under Argentine law to open her own investigation on behalf of their daughters. The probe has no legal weight, but can make nonbinding suggestions to the official investigator.
“From the moment I found out about Alberto’s death, it never occurred to me that he could have killed himself,” Judge Arroyo Salgado said in an interview at her office. “He was a person that took great care of his health. He was also kind of a narcissist.”
On a nearby table were photos of the couple’s daughters, ages 15 and 8, and a statue of Justice blindfolded—whose scales keep falling off.
“We are in this situation because from day one, when they found Alberto dead, they have been doing things badly,” she said. “The investigators did not work based on the hypothesis that this was the worst-possible scenario—that this was a homicide.”
In Argentina’s polarized political environment, Judge Arroyo Salgado’s motives have come under scrutiny. A pro-Kirchner lawmaker, Carlos Kunkel, said she was conducting her investigation to ensure she would collect insurance money for her daughters, an accusation Judge Arroyo Salgado calls “offensive.”
To probe Mr. Nisman’s death, Judge Arroyo Salgado put together her own team of forensic experts, including 84-year-old Osvaldo Raffo, who has performed more than 20,000 autopsies and whom she describes as the Lionel Messi of Argentine forensic science.
Their report says the lack of gunpowder on Mr. Nisman’s fingers and unusual bloodstains on his hand, shirt and around the bathroom indicate he was killed and his body moved before investigators arrived.
“I have no doubt that this wasn’t a suicide,’’ says Judge Arroyo Salgado. “Not because I’m capricious, but because the two forensic doctors told me that this was a homicide.”
Argentine authorities remove the body of Mr. Nisman from his apartment in Buenos Aires on Jan. 19. ENLARGE
Argentine authorities remove the body of Mr. Nisman from his apartment in Buenos Aires on Jan. 19. Photo: Claudio Fanchi/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Judge Arroyo Salgado also has raised questions about the conduct of government investigators, whose work she is entitled to view under Argentine law. Official investigators still haven’t fully examined Mr. Nisman’s computers and cellphones to determine whom he contacted or what might have been on his mind in the moments before he died, she says. Nor, she adds, have they viewed videotapes from his apartment building that could show who visited him during his last hours.
“I initially thought that the bungling of this investigation was due to mere inattention to details,” she says. “But given all that has happened, I think it goes beyond that.”
Ms. Fein, the lead government investigator, has said her sole interest is in determining the truth.
The Kirchner administration has worked to undercut Mr. Nisman’s image, taking out newspaper ads in Argentina and abroad accusing him of trying to destabilize the country.
In March, photos surfaced on the Internet—believed to have come from Mr. Nisman’s phone—showing him vacationing in Cancún with a female friend and cavorting at a party with skimpily dressed young women wielding sex toys. Mrs. Kirchner’s cabinet chief branded the dead prosecutor “shameless” and said he had squandered taxpayers’ money to indulge in a libertine lifestyle.
“They are saying a lot of things about him to hurt his reputation, as if questions about his personal life reduced the value and seriousness of his work,” says Judge Arroyo Salgado.
“The truth is, we’re going through a terrible, horrible time,” she says. “Most of my career I defended the poor in court, and I had an authentic vocation for justice and the law. Now, what I’m realizing is that when you’re trying to investigate things related to those who are politically and economically powerful, you can’t always apply the law and resolve things by the books. I have seen this before, but now I am experiencing it in a different way.”
Judge Arroyo Salgado says she and her daughters have been living in fear. She has been hearing strange noises in her home, where she has installed 11 video cameras. “My younger daughter no longer sleeps alone,” she says.
She says she will pursue her investigation for as long as it takes. Her forensic experts are preparing additional reports and a video presentation detailing how they think Mr. Nisman may have been killed.
At his funeral, the judge read aloud emotional letters written by his daughters. The rabbi who led it says no one who attended believed he committed suicide, which Jewish tradition regards as an offense against the sacredness of life.
In La Tablada, the Jewish cemetery in Buenos Aires, his body now rests a few yards from victims of the 1994 attack.
—María Eugenia Duffard contributed to this article.
Write to Taos Turner at taos.turner@wsj.com and Reed Johnson at Reed.Johnson@wsj.com
