A prominent US-based Jewish human rights group has expressed outrage over an ex-Spanish official’s insinuation that Jews might have been responsible for the recent death of his country’s attorney general, José Manuel Maza, during a trip to Buenos Aires.

The 66-year-old Maza passed away on Saturday after being taken to a hospital in the Argentine capital with a kidney infection. He was in Buenos Aires to attend an international law conference.

Maza had been leading the prosecution of 20 Catalan politicians following the recent independence referendum in the autonomous region of northeastern Spain.

In an Alerta Digital interview published on Monday, a former colleague of Maza’s, Ramiro Grau, stated, “If we join the interest of some states for Catalonia to be constituted as a new country, for example Israel — as much as its president has said otherwise — and the existence of a large colony of Jews in Argentina, there are those who claim that the real controllers are the Jews, it would not be a bad idea to do an autopsy to check and verify the real causes of his death.”

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Dr. Shimon Samuels — the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations — characterized Grau’s comment as “an extreme example of obsessive antisemitism” and called on Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy “to condemn Grau and take measures to strip him of his honors and state pension as the price for his hatemongering.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin American representative, Dr. Ariel Gelblung, alerted the Argentine delegation to the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) to the matter, and stated, “Grau had endangered the country´s Jewish community and thereby maligned Argentina.”

He also urged Argentina to “protest vigorously to Madrid.”

“The center is monitoring this slander and will take further measures accordingly,” he said.