JERUSALEM--Damián Patcher is a Argentine journalist who got a very lucky break.
Before midnight on Sunday, Jan. 18, he tweeted: "I've just been informed of an incident at the home of prosecutor Alberto Nisman."
Me acaban de informar sobre un incidente en la casa del Fiscal Alberto Nisman.— Damian Pachter (@damianpachter) January 19, 2015
The tweet was the beginning of an unspooling of a murky tale of murder, politics and foreign intrigue that has gripped Argentina with its spy thriller-like twists and turns.
Nisman was a man in the spotlight. After devoting ten years of his life to catching the people responsible for a 1994 attack against the Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, he had dropped a bombshell earlier that month by accusing Argentine president Cristina Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman of attempting to cover up Iran's hand in the crime which killed 85 people and injured hundreds of others -- an allegation Kirchner has denied.
A few hours before Nisman was expected to deliver his findings to Congress, he was found dead in his home with a single bullet wound to his head.
Argentinian investigators haven't yet concluded if he killed himself or was murdered.
Pachter broke the story, tweeting: "They found prosecutor Alberto Nisman in the bathroom of his Puerto Madero home in a puddle of blood. He was not breathing. Doctors are present."
Encontraron al fiscal Alberto Nisman en el baño de su casa de Puerto Madero sobre un charco de sangre. No respiraba. Los médicos están allí.— Damian Pachter (@damianpachter) January 19, 2015
For Pachter, trouble now ensued. His bosses at buenosairesherald.com turned against him; the government insinuated that he was a mole representing the intelligence community, and, scariest of all, he found himself pursued by someone from the Intelligence Secretariat. Feeling the heat, Pachter decide to hightail it out of Argentina.
But things only got worse: The official Twitter account of Argentina's government published his plane ticket and flight details, noting "the journalist Damián Pachter travelled to Uruguay with a return ticket for February 2nd."
El periodista Damián Pachter viajó a Uruguay con pasaje de regreso para el 2 de febrero http://t.co/dUGwifa9AO pic.twitter.com/muWhkHEvfK— Casa Rosada (@CasaRosadaAR) January 25, 2015
On Jan. 26, Pachter arrived in Israel (where he is also a citizen) looking wan and shaken.
In an interview, he told Mashable he feels "disappointed in my country," and asked, sardonically, if anyone can imagine the White House tweeting the private flight plan of a journalist. It was done, he assumes, "as part of a plan to cover up the main story, which are Nisman's accusations."
"Everything that happened with prosecutor Nisman -- from the moment he publicly announced the accusations -- took the authorities by surprise," he said. "They didn't know how to react and then, when he turned up dead, it took them a long time to say anything. Then what they said was full of contradictions."
The latest contradiction was when the investigator charged with probing Nisman's death, Viviana Fein, first denied any documents were found in Nisman's apartment, then, humiliatingly, reversed track and acknowledged that documents had indeed been found. An unsigned draft for the arrest of Kirchner was reportedly found in the trash can.
This has caused an outrage in an already inflamed Argentina.
Pachter, who plans on remaining in Israel for now, has a sense of history.
As the interview was winding down he mentioned the unhappy irony of his circumstances. The last journalist who fled Argentina for Israel was Jacobo Timerman, the editor of La Opinión, who was tortured by the nation's brutal junta before being exiled. He famously wrote "Prisoner with a Name, Cell Without a Number."
"Forty years later," he muses, "and I have had to leave Argentina when his son is the foreign minister who was accused by Nisman. The ironic twists and turns of fate."