Judge argues wire-tappings had been dismissed by the late AMIA special prosecutor
Judge Daniel Rafecas yesterday played down audio recordings released over the weekend by a news site which implied they were extracts from wire-taps ordered by late AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
The judge, who last week had rejected an indictment request based on Nisman’s case filed by prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita, explained that the thousands of telephone records — first released by Infobae and then by a number of different media outlets — were not relevant to the case investigating the alleged cover-up of the role of Iranian officials in the 1994 AMIA Jewish community centre bombing.
Nisman had accused President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other high-ranking government officials of participating in an alleged cover-up.
Moreover, Rafecas made it clear that neither the organizations investigating the case, nor the Attorney General’s Unit for the Investigation into the AMIA (UFI AMIA) nor Nisman himself had found them relevant, either.
“It can be deduced that the conversations are not linked in any way to the accusations made in the legal complaint,” stated Rafecas in a news release published yesterday by the Federal Criminal Court No. 3.
The judge stressed that while his office had only analyzed the telephone records submitted by prosecutor Pollicita so he was able to issue a ruling within a short period of time.
Rafecas explained he had only taken into consideration the recordings that the prosecution believed had the most substance to make a case — and that Nisman himself had already dismissed this allegedly “new” recordings.
The judge had spent seven days examining the transcripts of wire taps, which were recorded in a total 15 CDs, representing an estimated 100 conversations.
A MAJOR (MINOR?) RELEASE
Almost 40,000 telephone records gathered by Nisman that the late prosecutor allegedly gave to a person of confidence were allegedly “obtained” by news site Infobae.
The media outlet owned by businessman Daniel Hadad claimed it had published all of the audio archival recordings on their websites without editing, filtering or classifying the information.
The only recordings excluded were some of those already in the indictment request submitted to Rafecas.
These recordings were allegedly authorized by Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who presides over Federal Criminal Court No. 6, and were conducted by the Intelligence Secretariat (SI, formerly known as SIDE).The recordings include calls that didn’t even go through, as well as long conversations.
The wiretaps, some of which were also published by the La Nación daily, include conversations between D’Elía and Alberto “Yussuf” Khalil, one of the alleged participants of the plan to bomb the AMIA headquarters in Buenos Aires, where the latter talks about “two messages” that were allegedly “bothering” the Iranian government.
In a different exposed conversations, Khalil is heard talking to Ramón Allan Héctor Bogado (a man suspected to be an intelligence agent, a claim dismissed by the SI) and the two discuss when to attend a pro-government rally.
ZAFFARONI CRITICIZES NISMAN’S REPORT
Former Supreme Court justice Raúl Zaffaroni yesterday criticized the criminal complaint submitted by Nisman, claiming that the former AMIA prosecutor couldn’t have written it because it looked like it was written “by someone who doesn’t have any idea about judicial issues.”
“This man (Nisman) had been disturbed. We need to see who did it,” Zaffaroni said referring to the alleged author of the writ against the president filed in January. “Nisman was an official who had worked for decades, he couldn’t have written this. It’s apparent that there were several authors.”
The jurist, who last year resigned from his post at the Supreme Court, rejected that the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding with Iran about the AMIA investigation was a cover-up orchestrated by the administration to prevent Iranian officials from being arrested by Interpol, as claimed by Nisman.
“One can have an opinion about the memorandum — even have the most negative opinion — but that doesn’t mean that there was a criminal plan to stage a cover-up,” said Zaffaroni.
He indicated that Nisman’s accusation had no real substance because evidence can’t be gathered from something that never occurred — the Interpol arrest warrants against Iranians implicated in the AMIA terrorist attack were never revoked, nor was the memorandum after approved by the Iranian Congress.
Meanwhile, Cabinet Chief Aníbal Fernandez yesterday said he did not believe that prosecutor Pollicita would dare to challenge Rafecas’ dismissal of the AMIA cover-up investigation.
“It’s possible to challenge (the ruling), but you need to have a lot of training because Dr. Rafecas’ sentence is unappealable,” Fernández told reporters during his daily news conference.
Herald with online media
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