Ten years ago, on January 18, 2015, an Argentinian prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, was murdered for investigating the 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. That 1994 attack killed 85 and wounded some 300, the largest single mass murder of Jews between the Holocaust of World War Two and October 7, 2023. Nisman was its 86th victim.
On January 10, 2025, an Argentinian federal court’s investigation affirmed that Nisman’s death, which some had sought to depict as a suicide, was in fact a murder. The report concluded that Nisman was murdered because of his work investigating the role of Iran in the bombing and that of Argentinian president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in a cover-up during her time in office.
Nisman began investigating the AMIA bombing in 2004, a decade after the first, deeply flawed probe, pursuing a trail of evidence that led to Lebanese Hizbullah and Iran.
In 2005, Nisman identified a Lebanese citizen, Ibrahim Hussein Berro, as the suicide bomber who drove the explosives-laden truck into the AMIA building. In 2007, acting on Nisman’s revelations, INTERPOL issued red notices – alerts for internationally-wanted fugitives – for six Iranian officials, among them Ahmad Vahidi, who then served as commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and is now Minister of Interior. In April 2024, the government of Argentinian president Javier Milei formally requested Vahidi’s arrest as he traveled outside of Iran.
Nisman showed how Iran used diplomatic cover to carry out intelligence operations. His investigation uncovered Iran’s use of cultural and religious institutions to radicalize and recruit Argentinian citizens for terrorist activities. Nisman’s granular investigation into Iranian terrorism throughout the Western Hemisphere served as a roadmap for law enforcement around the world.
He became increasingly suspicious of Argentina’s policy toward Iran under President Kirchner. In 2013, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding, ostensibly to exchange Argentinian grain for Iranian oil (and possibly nuclear technology), but it also provided impunity for the accused. Nisman denounced the memorandum as unconstitutional. It was later annulled by an Argentinian court.
Iran had previously issued a fatwa calling for Nisman’s murder. He started to receive death threats. “Jew son of a thousand bitches,” one message declared. “Long live Iran. Long live Hizbullah, long live Islam. Death to usurping Zionism.”
In February 2013, a judge ordered extra security for Nisman and his family. Nisman meanwhile persevered with his investigation, filing a formal complaint three days before he was murdered. In it, he accused Argentina’s highest authorities – based on some 30,000 legally obtained wiretaps – of hatching a plan to spare the perpetrators of the AMIA attack from prosecution. “I could come out of this dead,” Nisman said in an interview on the same day. “But the evidence is there.”
His prediction tragically came true on the night of January 18, 2015, days before Nisman was to unveil his case against Kirchner to Argentina’s Congress.
Ten years on, Judge Eduardo Taiano, leading the investigation in Nisman’s death, revealed a litany of suspicious activities. The day before he was found dead, thousands of electronic files related to the AMIA bombing were destroyed in a fire in the presidential offices. Nisman’s guards abandoned their posts for twelve hours prior to his body being found. Nisman’s computer consultant with suspicious connections, Diego Lagomarsino, owned the pistol used to kill Nisman. “Federal prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman was the victim of a homicide, and his death was motivated by his work in the UFI-AMIA [unit] and, specifically, by his actions related to the Memorandum of Understanding with the Republic of Iran,” Taiano’s report stated.
Taiano stressed that the initial investigation into Nisman’s death had been deliberately bungled, “given that the event to be investigated consisted of the violent death of a federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation of the most serious attack in Argentine history, and that four days earlier he had denounced the highest authorities of the National Executive Branch in the framework of his professional responsibilities.” Taiano also confirmed that Nisman’s assailants, whose identity Taiano committed to pursuing, shot him in the bathroom of his apartment using Lagomarsino’s gun and then placed his body in a position to “simulate a suicide.”
Ten years after Nisman’s murder, and thirty-one years after the AMIA bombing, no one has been convicted of either crime. Nisman’s investigation and Taiano’s report point to the roles of senior Iranian and Argentinian officials. As the truth emerges, so must the wheels of justice now turn.
