Latin America
Related: About this forumCourt throws out Kirchner case
Court throws out Kirchner case
26 March 2015
A federal appeals court in Argentina has thrown out a case that accused President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of orchestrating a deal to cover up the alleged role of Iranian officials in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre.
The court's decision today upholds the decision of federal Judge Daniel Rafecas, who in February threw out the case saying it was not strong enough to warrant an investigation. His ruling was appealed against by prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita.
Prosecutor Alberto Nisman made the accusations against Ms Kirchner on January 14, and four days later he was found shot dead in his bathroom.
Mr Nisman's mysterious death, which has not been solved, has rocked the South American country.
More:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/court-throws-out-kirchner-case-31097763.html
forest444
(5,902 posts)To recap:
1. First there was Nisman's own proof-less complaint, which he didn't even prepare and which no judge would entertain despite the fact that most judges in Argentina are right-wing (30% were in fact appointed by the Dirty War dictatorship that ended in 1983).
Nisman's successor as AMIA Chief Prosecutor, Juan Murray, rejected the complaint as a distraction from the real case (the 1994 bombing of the AMIA center - which has been known from the very first forensic tests to be an inside job, btw).
2. Unable to get Murray on board, a different prosecutor (Gerardo Pollicita, a vocal supporter of the right-wing PRO party) resubmitted the complaint. It was again rejected - this time by Judge Daniel Rafecas, who could hardly be called a Cristina Kirchner supporter (Vice President Amado Boudou could tell you all about that; he's the only Vice President in Argentine history to be indicted on purely circumstantial evidence - mostly hearsay from a scorned woman). Note that Pollicita took the Nisman complaint up despite never having had purview over any aspect of the AMIA investigation.
3. Naturally an appeal was prepared - but not by Pollicita, since his role as a political hack in prosecutor's clothing (à la Ken Starr) had already been amply exposed by Argentina's very vocal media. It was presented instead by Germán Moldes - and again rejected, in this instance by an Appeals Tribunal.
Now. Who's Germán Moldes? He was a Menem protégé. Some might remember the "pro-business" former President Carlos Menem - the one who privatized Argentina's 300 state enterprises for peanuts (near-worthless Brady Bonds) after being conned by Poppy Bush and Wall Street to do so with promises of a Niagara Falls of investment into Argentina (we all know how thatturned out by 2001). It was Moldes who in 1992 obtained an illegal passport for the infamous Syrian arms dealer Monzer Al-Kassar - for which Moldes was rewarded with a plum job as Federal District Prosecutor (a powerful post since it covers Buenos Aires).
Unlike Pollicita, however, Moldes had experience in the AMIA case. He -like his pal, the late Alberto Nisman- was sued repeatedly by human rights and AMIA Jewish victims' rights groups for tipping off suspects and failing to pursue plausible leads (all of which contradicted the official "car bomb" fish tale).
A topsy-turvy world, this is.