Former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Photo: File.

The Argentine federal judge investigating the allegation that ex-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration conspired with Iran to hide Tehran’s culpability for the deadly 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires announced on Monday that Kirchner has been subpoenaed to appear before him on October 26.

In the latest sensational development in a case that has proceeded for over twenty years without a single conviction, Judge Claudio Bonadio banned Kirchner and fourteen other defendants from leaving the country until they have provided their testimonies.

Bonadio’s case is based on the original complaint that was to have been submitted by late special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in January 2015, which laid out the charge of complicity with Iran against Kirchner, her foreign minister Hector Timerman and several other officials. Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment the night before he was due to present his complaint to Argentina’s Congress; the initial spurious claim that Nisman committed suicide was finally disproven last week, when an official report from from Argentina’s Gendarmeria Nacional concluded that the federal prosecutor had been beaten, drugged, and then shot execution-style.

Along with Kirchner and Timerman, the former secretary general of the presidency, Oscar Parrilli, Kirchner confidante Luis D’Elia and ex-Foreign Ministry official Luis Zuain were among the individuals ordered to appear before Judge Bonadio. D’Elia achieved notoriety after he was caught on tape mocking Timerman as “that f—ing Jew” while the former Argentine foreign minister was in Syria negotiating the cover-up with the Iranians, during a secret 2011 meeting hosted by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Bonadio’s questioning will open on October 17 with Timerman’s appearance — although there is some doubt as to whether he will attend due to his increasingly poor health. Kirchner is scheduled to make the last appearance of the series on October 26 — four days after she is expected to win a Senate seat during Argentina’s midterm elections, which would guarantee her immunity from arrest.

Eamonn MacDonagh — an expert on Argentine politics who has written extensively on the AMIA case — told The Algemeiner on Monday that the subpoenas had vindicated Nisman’s 2015 complaint against the government. He paid special tribute to Nisman’s colleague, Gerardo Pollicita, for having “done the bulk of the work pushing Nisman’s accusation forward.”

“We may be a long time waiting for a confirmed, appeals-all-ended, criminal conviction here, but I think we can be certain now that this one will run and run,” MacDonagh said. “The investigation is going to roll on inexorably now and will be helped, in terms of the supporting atmosphere, by the present government’s likely big win in the midterms.”