The United States authorities have finally granted the Former Foreign Minister of Argentina with a visa, so he will be able to travel to New York to continue undergoing his cancer treatment.
Timerman, who is accused of colluding with the Iranian regime to discharge Tehran of its responsibility for the bombing of a Jewish center in the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires in 1994, on January 9 found out that his visa to the US had been revoked because of his house arrest while he was about to take a flight to the NYC.
However, on Wednesday, February 7 the Argentine Foreign Ministry announced the US State Department had agreed to provide Timerman with a visa on humanitarian grounds.
The 64-year-old former minister who alongside several senior Argentine officials, among whom the former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchne, have been indicted on Dececember 7, last year by a federal judge to face possible treason charges over a 2013 pact with Iran which later was declared as unconstitutional.
Timerman was placed under house arrest in December due to his health condition, instead of being detained in prison. Later, he obtained a permit from Argentina’s Ministry of Justice to leave Argentina and travel to New York for treatment.
However, when he attempted to travel to the United States in January 9 in order to continue his medical treatment at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, he found out that the US authorities had revoked his visa because of his arrest.
In an op-ed in the New York Times on December 20 Timerman wrote that “preventing me from getting timely medical attention is like condemning me to death.”
On the other side, former President Kirchner who is a member of the senate, enjoys parliamentary immunity from preventive detention.
Claudio Bonadio, the judge prosecuting Timerman, Kirchner and others involved in this case, believes they covered up Iranian involvement in the bombing by signing a pact with Iran, which permitted the suspects to be interrogated in Iran without the necessity to be brought to Argentina.
Nobody has been tried for the bombing, which murdered 85 people and hundreds more ended up wounded on July 18, 1994, when a vehicle packed with explosives crashed into the building of AMIA in downtown Buenos Aires.
Timerman is not only a former Foreign Minister of Argentina but also a former ambassador to the US, where he lived for more than a decade and where one of his daughters was born.