Arrest warrant for Argentine president found at dead prosecutor’s home

A draft of an arrest warrant for Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was found in the apartment of deceased prosecutor Alberto Nisman, according to a report Tuesday, two weeks after he was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

The document accuses Kirchner of covering up the alleged Iranian involvement in the deadly 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The bombing, which Nisman pinned on Iranian and Hezbollah operatives, left 85 people dead.

The documents, found in Nisman’s garbage by police investigators, also called for the arrest of Foreign Minister Hector Timerman.

Nisman was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on January 18, the night before he was scheduled to present his case against Kirchner before a closed-door session of an Argentine congressional committee.

Kirchner and Timerman have denied allegations that they secretly negotiated oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing.

Had the warrants been issued “it would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” a political analyst, Sergio Berensztein, said in The New York Times.

Nisman seems to have ultimately decided to denounce Fernandez and her government but not to ask for her immediate arrest.

Clarin, the largest newspaper in Argentina, on Sunday reported the discovery of the draft warrant.

On Monday, Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich in a news conference called the report a “lie and garbage” and ripped the article into several pieces in front of journalists and TV cameras.

Clarin on Tuesday published a copy of Nisman’s draft warrant in which he requests the arrests of Fernandez and Timerman, and requires them to remain in the country.

The document, which asked for stronger measures against the president than the document that Nisman eventually prepared before his death, was dated June 2014.

Anibal Fernandez, secretary general of the presidency, said Tuesday that “somebody” prepared the warrant for Nisman in the last hours before he was to present it, and that the prosecutor just signed it.

Viviana Fein, the prosecutor investigating Nisman’s death, confirmed on Tuesday that Nisman had prepared the draft warrant, whose existence she had initially denied, according to The New York Times.

Fein reported on Monday that the single bullet that killed Nisman entered near his ear at the back of his ear, suggesting that he did not commit suicide, but that the trigger was pulled by someone else. The only DNA found at the crime scene was Nisman’s.

Investigators have said Nisman‘s death appeared to be suicide, but it has been classified as a suspicious death, and homicide or an “induced suicide” have not been ruled out.

After his death, Kirchner suggested Nisman had been manipulated by former intelligence agents who then killed him to smear her.

Kirchner has offered no evidence to support her theory, and did not say who she thought was behind Nisman‘s death.

The death has rocked Argentina’s leadership, and also sparked rallies in the Jewish community in support of the prosecutor.

On Tuesday, Argentina’s Congress met to discuss an overhaul of the intelligence service suggested by Kirchner after Nisman’s death.