The Argentine federal police arrested this Sunday night in Buenos Aires the couple of the man accused of trying to kill Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last Thursday with a pistol.
The investigation into the frustrated assassination attempt has not yet yielded answers and is advancing in fits and starts.
Brenda Elizabeth Uliarte, 23, was arrested at the Palermo railway station while traveling downtown.
The hypothesis handled by Justice after a weekend with more questions than answers is that Fernando Sabag Montiel, the attacker, did not act alone.
His partner had declared in a television interview that they had been living together for a month, but that he had not seen him for two days before the attack.
The judge in charge of the case, María Eugenia Capuchetti, has decreed summary secrecy after a difficult Sunday in court.
The main clue that Justice had was the phone that Sabag Montiel was carrying the night of the attack, but its content has been deleted.
The judge heard this Sunday as witnesses to the experts who manipulated the aggressor's phone to determine why he reset himself to the factory state.
The mobile had been retained after the arrest of the attacker on Thursday night.
He was later handed over to the Capuchetti court.
The first to intervene on the phone, on Friday, were federal agents.
Justice is now investigating whether the data was erased due to the incompetence of the experts or if another person could have done it remotely.
The revelation has hit one of the faithful of Vice President Cristina Kirchner in the government cabinet.
The Security Minister, Aníbal Fernández, defended the security operation on Thursday and the manipulation of the evidence by the security forces that he leads.
But he put his resignation at the disposal of President Alberto Fernández: "The first thing I told the president was that I was willing, when he decided, to run."
The judge also heard the statement of one of Sabag Montiel's friends, who hours after the attack had been interviewed on television.
"I think her original intention was to kill her, unfortunately she didn't rehearse before," Mario Pablo Borgarelli said without blinking, who in his statement distanced himself from the detainee and introduced himself as "an acquaintance."
The phrase sums up the normalization of hatred of the former president in recent years, but also gives clues about the attacker: the circle of friends and acquaintances of Sabag Montiel on television channels describes a normal person, with relationships, work and a rent which he paid every month.
Brenda Uliarte, his partner, had declared to the media that he had lived with him for a month, that they had known each other for four, that he did not know he had a gun and that he had never spoken to him about Cristina Kirchner.
“The truth is, I don't remember any mention of the vice president.
She complained about the dollar and the economy, like everyone else, ”he told the
Telefe television network.
.
“I am very afraid because they take away the possibility of working and also because they are blaming us for something we did not do,” she assured before the cameras.
She also stated that she had found out about the attack on television and that she was "perplexed" after the arrest of her partner, whom she defined as "a good man" and a "worker."
The woman later denied seeing the gun her boyfriend used on Thursday and claimed to know nothing of the hundred bullets found in a search of her home.
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This has been the assassination attempt on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner |
The country
Cristina Kirchner's lawyer, Gregorio Dalbón, had argued hours before Brenda Uliarte's arrest that same hypothesis that the attack was not the work of the main suspect alone.
The lawyer assured that the assassination attempt was prepared and that other people knew the aggressor's intentions, although he did not point to anyone in particular.
"I can anticipate that there are more people involved," insisted Dalbón, who specified that it is not about "public people, they are like this boy", referring to the man accused of the attack against the 69-year-old Argentine vice president, which resulted unharmed and he didn't even notice.
Dalbón also criticized the fact that the suspect's mobile suffered, already in the hands of the investigators, a damage that apparently prevents access to the information it contained.
“It is incredible that they make mistakes and lose data as important as those that emerge from the phone of a murderer in this case,” said the lawyer, announcing that he will file a complaint for negligence.
Nazi symbology and erotic content on the internet
Sabag Montiel, 35, had a police record for possession of a knife.
On March 17, 2021, he was arrested for driving in a car without license plates and carrying a large knife.
He also wore tattoos of hate, of Nazi ideology, ideas that he reproduced on social networks.
Along with Brenda Uliarte, they had appeared more than once in street television interviews complaining about the government and state subsidies.
“Before I had a social plan, but I prefer to go out to work.
It seems to me that charging for social plans is encouraging vagrancy”, says Uliarte in one of them.
She and Sabag Montiel sold cotton candy on Corrientes Street, the main artery of the Buenos Aires theater circuit.
In social networks, Uliarte called herself
Ámbar
, a pseudonym under which she sold erotic content.
The assassination attempt occurred when Kirchner was signing autographs and greeting supporters Thursday night at the door of her building in the affluent neighborhood of Recoleta, where hundreds of protesters have been gathering for two weeks to support her in the midst of a trial against She for alleged corruption for which she could be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.
Although the assailant pointed his gun at the vice president's head and pulled the trigger twice, the gun did not work.
Sabag Montiel had five bullets in the magazine, he hadn't pushed back the slide of his semiautomatic pistol.
The investigators do not know if it is a mistake or if he did not really intend to kill Cristina Kirchner.
Warned by the protesters, who helped subdue the attacker, the vice president's bodyguards protected her and subdued the man, whose motives are still unknown.
The attacker has refused to testify and has only accepted a court-appointed lawyer.
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