Reporter who broke news of Nisman's death said to have fled to Israel
Source: Times of Israel
A journalist credited with being the first to report the gunshot death of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman has left Argentina because of fear for his safety. Damian Pachter of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald left the country Saturday, the local journalism group Foro de Periodismo Argentino said.
Haaretz reported Sunday that Pachter is on his way to Israel, where he is “planning to take refuge,” and that he is due in Tel Aviv on Sunday night. It said Pachter is Jewish and has Israeli citizenship, and that he told a local internet site that “I left because my life was in danger. My phones were being monitored. I intend to return to Argentina when my sources tell me conditions have changed. I don’t think that will happen in the term of this government.”
The Buenos Aires journalism group said Pachter reported on Friday he was followed by unknown people and felt his safety was at risk but did not elaborate. Calls and emails to Pachter on Saturday were not immediately returned. In a statement, Pachter’s employer said the journalist had not expressed his concerns to the newspaper and the organization was ready to help him in any way possible.
Meanwhile, authorities said Diego Lagomarsino, a computer expert and colleague who said he had brought prosecutor Alberto Nisman a handgun Saturday night at his request, has been barred from leaving Argentina. Lagomarsino, who spoke to authorities soon after Nisman’s death, said he had given a .22-caliber pistol to Nisman because the prosecutor wanted it for protection.
Read more: http://www.timesofisrael.com/reporter-covering-nismans-death-flees-argentina/
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bananas
(27,509 posts)Journalist who broke news of prosecutor's death flees Argentina
Reuters
8 hours ago
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The first journalist to report on the death of a Argentine state prosecutor, who was investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, said on Saturday that he had fled Argentina fearing for his life.
"I'm leaving because my life is in danger. My phones are tapped," Damian Pachter, a journalist with the Buenos Aires Herald, told the website Infobae.
The website carried a photograph of Pachter, wearing a cap and carrying sunglasses, at the airport before he boarded an Aerolineas Argentinas flight.
Telam, an Argentine state-run news agency, reported that the flight was bound for neighboring Uruguay.
<snip>
(Reporting by Nicolas Misculin; Writing by Anthony Esposito; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
bemildred
(90,061 posts)When the elephants play, the mice should hide.
forest444
(5,902 posts)Last edited Mon Jan 26, 2015, 11:01 PM - Edit history (1)
There's been a concerted effort by right-wing media in both Argentina and the U.S., as well as from the Likudniks currently in power in Israel, to pin Nisman's death on the Fernández de Kirchner administration. Pachet's passive-agressive stunt is very much a part of that.
Pachter never reported feeling under any kind of threat to his employer, the Buenos Aires Herald (telling them instead he had the flu when he failed to show up for work on Thursday). He waited two more days, and took the "enormous risk" of leaving on a scheduled flight out of the nation's busiest airport - where, goes without saying, Gendarmerie officers could have stopped him in a second if anyone in government had been "after him."
So we should believe that Cristina Kirchner was after him, for no reason at all (he didn't report anything that hasn't already been reported ad nauseum in every newspaper and news channel in the country), and just when coverage of the Nisman controversy is at fever pitch!?
He was worried for his "safety"? Argentina is a country where right-wing entertainers and talking heads spend all their time casting aspersions against Kirchner and just about everyone in her administration, without so much as having to worry about lawsuits or their careers (on the contrary) - much less official persecution of any kind! And coming from somebody who writes editorials like an American Spectator op ed shill!?
This pathetic attempt at self-victimization was just another pot shot; the only real question is, who put him up to it?
The vindictive media baron with 11 Panamanian accounts whose dreams of triple-play monopoly over Argentine media and telecom were dashed by Cristina Kirchner's 2009 Media Law? (the law -the first of its kind in the region- limits media control by any one corporation, and was cited by everyone from the UN, to the IFJ, to Reporters Without Borders, to the Carter Center as a model for not only Latin America, but the rest of the world as well)
Right-wing factions in Argentine State Intelligence with a long history of murder, kidnappings, and just about any other kind of crime you can imagine, beside themselves over the government's prosecution and conviction of 600 dictatorship-era monsters?
Perhaps his countrymen the current Israeli government - who as President Obama knows all too well are in quite a hurry to reach for anything they possibly can to derail peace talks between Secretary Kerry and Iran.
Or as Pachter himself might say:
"What? Me, worry?"
