BUENO AIRES – A former Spanish government official has accused Israel and Argentine Jewry of being behind the untimely death of Spain’s attorney general while on a working trip to Argentina.

Spanish Attorney General José Manuel Maza, 66, died Nov. 19 after being taken to a hospital in Buenos Aires, where he was attending an international law conference, with a kidney infection.

Maza has prosecuted 20 Catalonian politicians in the wake of the recent Catalonian independence referendum, leading Spanish national policy against the approval of the vote.

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Ramiro Grau, a predecessor of Maza, said in an interview with the Spanish-language Alerta Digital news website that “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.”

On Thursday, Ariel Gelblung, the Latin American representative of Wiesenthal Center raised the matter with the Argentine congressional delegation at the Latin American Parliament, or PARLATINO, being held in Panama, arguing that “Grau has endangered the country´s Jewish community and thereby maligned Argentina.”

Gelblung told JTA that he called for Buenos Aires “to protest vigorously to Spain and we will be monitoring this slander and will take further measures accordingly.”

Wiesenthal Center director for international relations Shimon Samuels said Grau’s statement was “an extreme example of obsessive anti-Semitism.”