Alberto Nisman was a 51-year-old special prosecutor in Argentina who had spent more than a decade investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. On January 18, 2015, his lifeless body was found in his apartment in the capital. Though Argentine authorities have since conceded that the precise cause of Nisman’s death is unknown, their first reaction was to label it a suicide. But as waves of contradictory evidence emerged from the forensic examination, and as Nisman’s colleagues and friends angrily disputed that this energetic jurist would have suddenly taken his own life, the suicide explanation rapidly disintegrated. The smart money is now on murder, and establishing who might have pulled the trigger rises to a level of intrigue more commonly found in the novels of John le Carré.

The question of why Nisman died is more important. His death coincided with the ascension of two major geopolitical trends, both of which were intimately related to his life’s work: a surge in global anti-Semitism and the rise of Iran (the likely culprit behind the AMIA bombing) as the dominant power in the Middle East.