Alberto Nisman: Journalist Damian Pachter flees Argentina in fear for life over prosecutor's death

Damian Pachter, the journalist who broke the news of the death of top prosecutor Alberto Nisman, has fled Argentina for Israel in fear of his life.

"I am leaving because my life is in danger," Pachter told the news website Infobae.com. "My phones have been extensively tapped."

Pachter's employer said the journalist had not told them his concerns and the organisation was ready to help him.

"I have no idea when I'll be back in Argentina; I don't even know if I want to," the journalist wrote in a column on Haaretz newspaper. "What I do know is that the country where I was born is not the happy place my Jewish grandparents used to tell me stories about."

Nisman had accused President Cristina Fernandez of whitewashing the investigation of Iran over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre.

Pachter, from the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, was the first to report that the body of the 51-year-old federal prosecutor had been found in a pool of blood in his bathroom in the luxurious Buenos Aires district of Puerto Madero.

His scoop was retweeted by hundreds of people:

Nisman was expected to reveal damning allegations involving Fernandez at a closed-door hearing in Congress.

Appointed 10 years ago by the president's late husband Nestor Kirchner, the prosecutor accused Fernandez of opening a secret back channel to an Iranian gang who reportedly planted the car bomb that killed 85 people at the AMIA Jewish community centre in the Argentine capital.

Nisman claimed the plot was orchestrated to clear the suspects to import oil from and export grain to Iran.

On Thursday (22 January), Fernandez said she was convinced that Nisman's death was not suicide.

Investigators initially said they thought he had committed suicide, but later said they could not rule out homicide or "induced suicide".