As tides shift, daughters of killed prosecutor meet Argentine president

BUENOS AIRES — Newly elected Argentinian President Mauricio Macri visited the daughters of assassinated prosecutor Alberto Nisman Sunday, promising “to do justice for the memory of your father.”

The president’s visit to the family vacation home at Los Abrojos was a radical departure from the previous government of Christina Kirchner, who neither received Nisman’s relatives, nor expressed condolences to the Nisman family, and posthumously accused Nisman of using public funds to hire prostitutes.

The President’s Office said in a statement on Twitter that Macri, who was elected to office in December, expressed “the recognition of the State of Argentine for the work” Nisman did in the 1995 AMIA Jewish community center bombing case.

The new Argentinian president’s visited marked one year after Nisman was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound to the head.

Nisman’s daughters, Iara and Kala, met with Macri at his personal weekend house, called Los Abrojos. The meeting was announced on Twitter and in the presidential public schedule.

The 20-minute meeting, during which Argentine Masorti Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff prayed in Nisman’s memory, was held without reporters present.

Sunday’s meeting was held a day before a public gathering organized by the Argentinian Jewish political umbrella DAIA called “Candles for Nisman,” who was found dead in his apartment on Jan. 18, 2015.

Macri on Friday ordered government agencies to declassify every file related to Nisman’s still unresolved death. Macri ordered the files sent to Judge Fabiana Palmaghini, who is in charge of a new stage of the investigation after the case was removed from prosecutor Viviana Fein one month ago.

Also on Friday, the Argentinian secret service said it would allow its agents to appear before Palmaghini to provide information about how the agency protected or may have spied on the late prosecutor.

“I cannot determine for the moment whether it was a suicide or a homicide,” prosecutor Viviana Fein said last year, when she convened the authors of an independent forensic report to examine their evidence, including two tests that did not find gunpowder on Nisman´s hands. In July, US forensic pathologist Cyril Welch analyzed the case and said he believes that Nisman likely was murdered.

In the new stage of the investigation, Palmaghini will interrogate the late AMIA prosecutor’s bodyguards to analyze how well the area was protected in the hours before Nisman was found dead.

Nisman’s body was found four days after he sued then-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, charging that her government covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, which left 85 dead and hundreds wounded.

Nisman’s lawsuit accused the government of establishing a “parallel communication channel” with Iran in order to “transmit and implement the orders established by the President (Kirchner) and, in that way, reach the illicit objectives,” including establishing trade relations.

His death was discovered just hours before he was to present the evidence to Argentine lawmakers at the National Parliament.