Argentina’s government has stepped up efforts to track down a fugitive former spymaster who is reported to be in hiding in Miami, warning the US that it is putting its relationship with the South American country at risk.

Antonio Stiuso, a former operations chief of the now-disbanded intelligence secretariat, fled Argentina following the death in January of star prosecutor Alberto Nisman, an unsolved mystery which triggered a political earthquake.

Nisman was found shot dead in his bathroom on 18 January, days after accusing president Cristina Fernández of conspiring to cover up alleged Iranian involvement in a 1994 bomb attack on a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.

Fernández has claimed that Nisman’s death may have been stage-managed by Stiuso in order to incriminate her and destabilize her government. Stiuso’s exact whereabouts have been unknown since shortly after he testified at the judicial inquiry into Nisman’s death. Media reports have alleged that he is in Miami.

On Wednesday, Argentina’s cabinet chief of staff, Anibal Fernández, said that the US had failed to respond to eight formal requests for details on the missing spy chief’s whereabouts.

“We ask ourselves sometimes: ‘Is the United States ready to allow the bilateral relations between it and Argentina to worsen for a man they all say has no importance, no strategic value for the United States?’” he told reporters.

Oscar Parrilli, head of the Federal Intelligence Agency, said Argentina planned to summon the American ambassador to Buenos Aires, Noah Mamet, to explain “the absolute lack of response and in some ways complicity in this situation”.

Meanwhile, Interpol has issued a “blue notice” for Stiuso, after a request from the team of prosecutors investigating the 1994 blast that Fernández named to replace Nisman. The notice is not an arrest warrant, but a request for international authorities to collect “information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a crime”.

Earlier this week, President Fernández alluded to Stiuso in her address to the United Nations general assembly in New York, although she did not name him. “I would say that he is being protected. Protected from what? I don’t know,” she said.



Stiuso had been one of Nisman’s closest collaborators in the investigation into the 1994 blast, as well as one of the president’s most trusted advisors, before his relationship with Fernández turned sour.

Nisman and Stiuso had assembled a large quantity of evidence that Nisman used to charge a group of Iranian officials with planning the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires 21 years ago. Interpol arrest warrants had been issued by Argentina for the arrest of the Iranian officials, with no result.

Stiuso and the president had a falling out in 2013 after Fernández decided on a change of tactic with Iran that included replacing Nisman’s investigation with a binational Argentinian-Iranian commission to investigate the blast.

That understanding ultimately failed after Argentina’s supreme court declared the agreement with Iran unconstitutional because it prevented the judicial system from continuing its investigation into the blast.

In January, Nisman went public with allegations that the real motive behind Argentina’s rapprochement with Iran was trade concessions by the Iranian government that would help alleviate Argentina’s economic woes.

His mysterious death a few days later, however, put a quick end to his investigation against the president. The courts threw out Nisman’s charges after his death, while Fernández began claiming that Nisman had been either murdered or forced to commit suicide by Stiuso to incriminate her.

Argentina’s foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, also accused the US of harbouring Stiuso, in an interview with the Buenos Aires daily Página/12 on Wednesday. “The lack of cooperation shown by Obama’s government is startling,” Timerman said. “Stiuso must enjoy some degree of protection that has allowed him to live in hiding for so many months. He is surely being protected by his contacts in the US secret services.”