At 11pm after meeting with his source, Pachter, who works for the web version of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, wrote on his Twitter account: “I have just been informed about the incident at the home of prosecutor Alberto Nisman.”
About a half-hour later he tweeted: “They found Alberto Nisman in the bathroom at his home in Puerto Madero lying in a pool of blood. He wasn’t breathing. The doctors are there.”
With his tweets, Pachter was the first journalist to break the story of Nisman’s death. Since then, Argentinean society has been rocked by the ongoing investigation into the case and speculation concerning the evidence he had compiled against Fernández de Kirchner and other officials.
After discovering he was being followed by intelligence agents, Pachter said he had to flee the country. He first boarded an Aerolineas Argentina flight to neighboring Montevideo, Uruguay on Friday.
From South America and with a stopover in Madrid, he flew to Israel, a country where he holds citizenship and he says he “spent the best years” of his life.
As the case unfolds, journalists in Argentina are once again feeling the same sense of pressure they did 18 years ago when photographer José Luis Cabezas was killed after taking photos of Alfredo Yabrán, a businessman who was linked to corruption cases during the administration of President Carlos Menem.
Pachter doesn’t know why anyone would want to threaten him on Twitter or by telephone, but he fears his life is in danger. He claims that his phone was tapped and that he was followed “for at least several hours” by a person he believes was an Argentinean intelligence agent.