Even after declaring Nisman’s death a murder, Kirchner allowed no sympathy for him. At a press conference, she suggested that he and Lagomarsino were lovers. She said that, as many had now suspected, she had fired the chiefs of side because they had opposed her agreement with Iran. Many Argentines did not believe her proclamations of innocence. In a nationwide poll commissioned the week after Nisman’s death, seventy per cent of those surveyed believed that he had been murdered, and half said they believed that the government was involved.

Basic facts about Nisman’s death remain unexplained. No gunpowder residue was found on his hand, as is typical of self-inflicted gunshots. His fingerprints were found on the pistol, but not those of Lagomarsino, who had just lent him the gun. A few days after the death, the police said that they had discovered a third entrance to Nisman’s apartment: a corridor for an air-conditioner that connects to a neighbor’s apartment; there they found an unidentified footprint. Police checked a camera mounted in the service elevator, and it was broken. In the stairwell, there were no cameras at all.

Evidence accumulated that the investigation into Nisman’s death had been so sloppy as to be fatally compromised. A woman summoned off the street to witness the crime-scene investigation (as required by Argentine law) described a partylike atmosphere. “They drank tea, ate croissants,” she said. “They touched everything. There were, like, fifty people in the apartment.” Police photos, provided to me by an Argentine journalist, show a group of police, without gloves, picking through Nisman’s belongings.

Nisman’s former wife, Sandra Arroyo Salgado, a powerful judge, denounced the investigation and engaged a leading forensics team to review the autopsy results. The team concluded that no muscular spasm had taken place in his right hand, as would have been normal if he had fired a gun, and that, in all likelihood, his body had been moved. (A police photo shows what are purported to be bloodstains on Nisman’s bed, suggesting that his body had indeed been moved.) According to the forensics team’s written report, which the newspaper La Nación obtained, stains in the bathroom sink had been scrubbed away, and the position of the gun was inconsistent with Nisman’s having shot himself. The most likely scenario, the report said, was that Nisman had been shot, while kneeling, in the rear-right of his head, and that he died in “agony.” At a press conference that Salgado held to announce the findings, she said, “His death is an assassination that demands a response from the country’s institutions.”

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On February 18th, a month after Nisman’s death, tens of thousands of Argentines gathered to remember him and to protest what they described as the government’s failure to protect a prosecutor. In pouring rain, the demonstrators walked silently from the Argentine Congress to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the building where Kirchner works. Many carried placards. One read, “You can’t suicide us all.” Kirchner accused the marchers of playing politics and stayed home. The next day, she celebrated her birthday. “In the Chinese horoscope,” she wrote on Twitter, “I am a snake.”

During my interview with Kirchner, she seemed unnerved by talking about Nisman’s death. When I raised the question of whether she’d had him killed, she blurted, “No!,” and then handed me a printout of the statement that she’d written for her Web site. She seemed mostly disturbed by the damage that Nisman’s death was doing to her reputation—which, she suggested, only strengthened the case that she hadn’t been involved. “Tell me, who has suffered the most with the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman? You tell me, Sherlock Holmes.” When I suggested it was she—that half the country believed she was involved in Nisman’s death—she nodded. “Exactly. This is one of the keys.”

This view is widespread in Argentina, at least among Kirchner’s supporters. “Nisman’s case wasn’t that strong,” José Manuel Ugarte, a professor of law at the University of Buenos Aires, told me. “Kirchner would have survived it. I think the people who did this are people who wanted to destroy her government.”

Much of the early suspicion focussed on Jaime Stiuso, the senior official in side. Juan Martín Mena, whom Kirchner appointed to help lead the newly created intelligence agency, portrayed Stiuso as the leader of a rogue faction that was running a smuggling network. He said that senior members of side had a history of selling sensitive information to private buyers and of using such information to coerce results from reluctant judges.

Prosecutors say that on the last afternoon of Nisman’s life he tried repeatedly to call Stiuso, without success. They summoned Stiuso to answer questions and face embezzlement charges, but he vanished. One acquaintance of his said that he had fled to Uruguay; Kirchner thought that he was hiding in the United States.

Mena said that he did not believe that Nisman was involved in Stiuso’s illegal activities. So why did Nisman and Stiuso decide to work together against Kirchner’s outreach to Iran? Mena told me that, in their desire to keep the amia investigation going, the two men “followed foreign interests.” Which foreign interests? “The United States and Israel,” he said. “One hundred per cent.”

In the days before Nisman died, he believed that the Iranians were coming for him. When he met Bullrich, the congresswoman, he told her that he had overheard wiretapped conversations of Argentine military-intelligence officers saying they had passed his personal information to agents of Iran—on orders from Kirchner. Nisman said the Iranians knew “about him, about the investigation, with details about his family, about his daughters, about all the movements of his daughters.”

Since the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime has maintained an aggressive assassination program. The regime has been accused of murdering at least eighteen people living outside Iran, most of them Iranian dissidents. The most notorious murders took place in 1992, when Iranian agents gunned down four Kurdish exiles at a Greek restaurant in Berlin. In that case, German prosecutors had pursued Iranian officials relentlessly, much as Nisman did.

Yet no one in the Iranian regime seemed especially troubled by Nisman’s public allegations. And even if the regime wanted him dead why wait until after he gave his complaint to a federal judge? Many Argentines I talked with wondered whether he could have uncovered some other secret that caused someone in the Iranian—or the Argentine—government to kill him.

By the time Kirchner announced the agreement about the amia case, Nisman’s obsession with Iran had expanded beyond Argentina. That year, he and his staff produced a five-hundred-page report outlining what it said was Hezbollah’s and Iran’s terrorist “infiltration” in Latin America. (A U.S. official called the report “spot on.”) A month before Nisman died, he told the writer Gustavo Perednik that he believed Argentina and Iran could be secretly discussing renewing the nuclear agreement of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “Nisman said this was part of the big deal,” Perednik told me.

In January, 2007, according to a former senior official in Chávez’s government, Ahmadinejad visited Caracas and asked Chávez to intercede with the Kirchners. The official, who attended the meeting, said that Ahmadinejad wanted access to Argentine nuclear technology. (The official is one of several who are coöperating with American investigators, building a case against Venezuela for helping smuggle drugs for Iran and Hezbollah.) Ahmadinejad didn’t specify what sort of technology he wanted. But the Iranian reactor in Arak, still under construction, uses similar technology to an Argentine reactor at Atucha. Both are heavy-water reactors capable of producing plutonium, which can be used in nuclear weapons. “Brother, I need a favor,” Ahmadinejad told Chávez, according to the official. “What it costs in terms of money, we will cover.”