Before being murdered, prosecutor Alberto Nisman had accused Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner of covering up Iranian involvement in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center. Photo: Twitter.

The Argentine official probing the death of Alberto Nisman — the federal prosecutor in charge of investigating the July 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires — has formally requested that the case now be treated as a murder inquiry.

Nisman was found dead in his apartment in the Argentine capital on January 18, 2015, the day before he was due to unveil a complaint accusing the government of then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of negotiating a secret pact with Iran to exonerate the Tehran regime for its role in the AMIA atrocity.

Until now, the cause of Nisman’s death has been officially classified as “unknown,” with officials loyal to Kirchner advancing the dubious notion that the prosecutor committed suicide. But on Wednesday, Eduardo Taiano, the prosecutor in charge of the Nisman file, said the death should now be treated as a homicide, following a new police report published in May of this year which determined that Nisman had in fact been murdered by two individuals who broke into his apartment.

The police report concluded that Nisman was beaten and drugged, and placed in front of his bathtub. While one of the attackers held him under the armpits “as in a hug,” the other shot him through the head.

Taiano has also requested that Diego Lagomarsino — an IT specialist who worked closely with Nisman — be investigated as one of the individuals who carried out the murder. That request was originally filed by lawyers acting for Sara Garfunkel and Sandra Nisman, Alberto Nisman’s mother and sister respectively.

In the weeks after Nisman’s death, Lagomarsino confirmed that the .22-caliber Bersa pistol used to shoot the prosecutor was his. He claimed that Nisman had asked him for the gun to protect himself from “some lunatic” angered by his complaint against Kirchner and her colleagues.

Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured when a van packed with explosive fuel was driven into the AMIA building in downtown Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. Nisman took over the AMIA investigation  in 2005; in 2007, international law enforcement agency Interpol issued “red notices” for five Iranian officials wanted in connection with the bombing.