BUENOS AIRES — Confronted with a deepening scandal, the president of Argentina abruptly reversed herself Thursday, saying that the death of the lead prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center was not a suicide as she and other government officials had suggested.
Instead, President Cristina Fernández suggested that the prosecutor’s death was part of what she hinted was a sinister plot to defame and destroy her.
The president’s change of position added a major twist into the suspicious death of the prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, whose body was found in his apartment in Buenos Aires late Sunday with a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
“As the days go by, instead of knowing more, we know less,” Carlos Pagni, a political commentator, wrote in a column in La Nación newspaper, in which he pointed to the case’s “tide of unknown quantities.”
Nisman had long accused Iran of planning and financing the 1994 attack, which killed 85 people. But this month he accused Fernández and top aides of trying to subvert his 10-year investigation into the bombing — allegations that the government has flatly rejected.
Using transcripts of intercepted phone calls, Nisman said the government had pursued a secret deal with Iran to exchange Iranian oil for Argentine grains and to shield Iranian officials from charges they had orchestrated the bombing.
Nisman had been scheduled to testify to lawmakers about his accusations Monday. News of his death, just hours before that widely anticipated testimony, immediately raised suspicions of a political coverup.
Thousands of Argentines took to the streets after Nisman’s death was announced, not only to show their anger at the unsolved bombing, but to demand a full and open investigation into Nisman’s death.
After having suggested that his death appeared to be a suicide, Fernández’s new explanation Thursday was contained in a letter posted on her website, saying that Nisman had been manipulated to smear her.
“They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead,” Fernández wrote in the letter, which she subtitled, in part: “The suicide (that I am convinced) was not suicide.”
The president offered no clear explanation or evidence as to who was responsible.
Officials in Fernández’s government have dismissed Nisman’s assertions about a secret deal with Iran, saying he had been manipulated by Antonio Stiusso, a former senior intelligence official ousted by the president in December.
Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman said the government never tried to get Interpol to lift the arrest warrants against Iranian officials wanted in connection with the attack.
Timerman said he had released an e-mail from Ronald Noble, former secretary general of Interpol, agreeing that the Argentine government had been “consistent and unwavering” in arguing that the arrest warrants should stay in place.