Prosecutor Assassinated by Iran? Shot in Head Hours Before Testimony Against Iranian and Argentine Leaders

Buenos Aires suffered two major attacks on Jewish sites in the 1990s: A 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy killed 29, and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center killed 85 people.

Prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused the Argentine government of covering up Hezbollah and official Iranian government involvement in 1994 attack.  “Nisman claimed that the president had decided to “not incriminate” former senior Iranian officials for their roles in planning the bombing, and instead has sought a rapprochement with Tehran, “establishing trade relations to mitigate Argentina’s severe energy crisis,” the Buenos Aires Herald reported.  “The president and her foreign minister took the criminal decision to fabricate Iran’s innocence to sate Argentina’s commercial, political and geopolitical interests,” the newspaper quoted Nisman as alleging.

Prosecutor Nisman traced the authorization for the July 18, 1994, terrorist attack to a meeting of Iran’s National Security Council held a year before, and compiled sufficiently compelling evidence of Iran’s role in the crime as to have several leading Iranian figures, including Vahidi and former presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, placed on an Interpol “red notice” list. The final decision to attack the AMIA center was allegedly made by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then-president Rafsanjani.

Last May, an Argentine court declared unconstitutional an agreement Between the Argentinian government and Iran to jointly probe the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish center. (Imagine if the Supreme Court suggested that they should, along with Al-Queda or the Taliban, jointly probe the events of 9/11.) The agreement had been approved in 2013 by Argentina’s congress, at the request of the executive branch. Nisman consistently argued that the agreement constituted “undue interference of the executive branch in the exclusive sphere of the judiciary.”  Many Argentine judges agreed.  Since 2006, Argentine courts have demanded the extradition of eight Iranians, including former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former defense minister Ahmad Vahidi and Mohsen Rabbani, Iran’s former cultural attache in Buenos Aires, over their alleged involvement in the bombing.  Full ARTICLE HERE

Nisman was scheduled to testify before lawmakers at a Congressional hearing this morning – Monday, January 19, 2015.  But he was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound to the head instead.  Police have already ruled it a suicide – an unusual act for someone finally about to literally have his day in court after working for years on this case.  A much more plausible explanation is that he aggravated too many senior Argentine and Iranian leaders.  A 22 caliber handgun was found, and the shell from the bullet.  If I wanted to kill myself with a handgun, I would use a much larger caliber, to make sure I die, and not just give myself brain damage.  There are BB guns about as powerful as a 22.

BUT – a 22 is much quieter than a high caliber like a 9mm or a 45, and is often used in assassinations.  I see no articles claiming the 22 pistol was registered to Nisman.  There was also a key in the lock on the inside of his door, preventing anyone with a key on the outside from opening the door.  This seems incompatible with the suicide theory as well – if he wanted to quietly kill himself and was kind enough to use a low caliber weapon, why create an extra difficulty for those who he knew would need to come in and clean up?  Of course, if you are an assassin and you want to give yourself extra time to escape the scene the same way you snuck in, making the door less accessible to anyone coming to investigate noises makes sense.  (ARTICLE)

The assassination (sorry, “suicide”) appears to reinforce the idea that money talks and murders can be overlooked if lots of money (or oil) talks very loudly.  I hope Argentina’s leaders were at least able to negotiate a remarkable energy deal with Iran. 

EDIT: I am adding this excerpt from Business Insider on January 23: “The lack of an exit wound suggested the fatal shot was fired at a further distance than Nisman could have managed had the wound been self-inflicted. His last WhatsApp was a photo of stacks of documentation related to the next day’s testimony and Nisman had apparently given his maid a grocery list for the following week. A 10-person government security detail was reportedly pulled off of his apartment the night of his assassination. Most damningly, there was no gunpowder residue found on Nisman’s hands, physical evidence that he didn’t discharge a firearm prior to his death.”  Nisman apparently documented a great deal about Iran’s terror network in South America – and they stand to gain as much as the Argentine President from his death.  Full Business Insider article HERE

For what it’s worth, Argentina a century ago was an economic powerhouse rivaling the United States.  Buenos Aires was often compared to Chicago, and many European immigrants chose to leave Europe for Argentina instead of the United States  Argentina was ranked among the richest nations of the world, AHEAD of France and Germany, the two dominant military powers.  In the article “One hundred years ago Argentina was the future. What went wrong?“ the Economist cites many issues including a lack of education.  “Argentina had among the highest rates of primary-school enrollment in the world and among the lowest rates of secondary-school attendance. Primary school was important to create a sense of citizenship, says Axel Rivas of CIPPEC, a think-tank. But only the elite needed to be well educated.”  The lack of advanced education over several generations led to reduced modernization and minimal technological innovation.

A predominantly poor and uneducated population also trends towards socialism, which always destroys a nation in the long run.  Socialism offers little motivation for intelligent, hard-working people to reach their full potential when they can’t keep the benefits of their work.  It does offer the motivation for such people to leave for another country where they will be rewarded.  (Which is why there was a “brain drain” from many other nations to the United States for so long.)  Socialism also punishes those investors who risk their money to develop modern equipment and technology in Argentina.  “Property rights are insecure: ask Repsol, the Spanish firm whose stake in YPF, an Argentine oil company, was nationalized in 2012.” (link)

What does this have to do with the original topic of this article?  I think it ties back in quite well.  You see, in socialist cultures wealth and success are “unfair” advantages.  Like Obama’s comments about business owners not having built their own businesses themselves – socialists see wealth as something that is only created on the backs of the oppressed – and therefore wealth is meant to be redistributed to the “deserving” poor.  Anti-semitism is a likely development in a nation where wealth is harshly associated with greed and taking advantage of the common people.  I think if Iranians had bombed something like a YMCA and killed 85 Catholic Argentines, the nation might have taken it more personally and may have been less likely to look the other way and make a financial deal with the terrorists.  Iran could have performed a similar bombing closer to home – in Europe, for example – but the Iranians undoubtedly chose to act in a nation where they knew authorities would not aggressively investigate the bombing of a Jewish community center.

In any case, an Argentine prosecutor went public last week.  He had hundred of pages of documentation and was ready to establish that Iran was behind the bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina years ago and that the leaders of Argentina, including the president, swept evidence under the rug and even jointly investigated with Iran while negotiating a sweet energy deal for Argentina.  The prosecutor was found shot in the head hours before he was scheduled to present his evidence in a Congressional hearing.

I hope you will forgive my unusual tangents as I conclude this article, but these crimes remind me of Genesis 6:5 (probably because I was reading about the days of Noah recently): “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  God soon started a global catastrophe that almost wiped out humanity – much as I conclude we will see again in a few years (read End Times and 2019.)

Argentina may be where it is today – with a weak economy and lots of corruption – because of socialism and a lack of higher education.  I worry that these same trends are growing in the United States – a dumbing down of the population with reduced standards of education, along with the simultaneous growth of socialism and mockery of religious values.  How can we encourage our youth to value truth for its own sake; to value ethics and morals in a culture where they are not clearly respected or rewarded?  We must teach them from a young age.  The Book of Psalms opens with “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! But his delight is in the law of the Lord.”  Galatians 6:7 says “whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”  I believe that in the long run, this is true for a single individual, a nation like Judah, or Israel, or Argentina, or America – and that it is true for humanity as a whole.  If there is even one child you can help by instilling a deep respect for the law and for truth and integrity – I believe it will make a difference.

Thank you for putting up with my thoughts and commentary to the end of this article.

— contributed by David Montaigne

author of  End Times and 2019  and   Antichrist 2016-2019

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