An armed man has tried to assassinate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The attacker, a Brazilian national, pointed a gun at her head in front of her house shortly before nine o’clock on Thursday night. In the television images, a man can be seen firing her gun, but without a shot being fired, which allowed her to get out of it unharmed.
The incident occurred a few meters from the former president’s building, in the luxurious Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta, where hundreds of protesters have been gathering for days to support her in the midst of a trial against her for alleged corruption. The attacker has been identified by the federal police as Fernando André Sabag Montiel, a 35-year-old Brazilian. He camouflaged himself among the Kirchnerist militants in order to reach Fernández de Kirchner when she was returning home from the Senate.
Warned by the protesters, the vice president’s guards protected her and cornered the armed man. The detainee was transferred to a police station to carry out the corresponding investigations, while an expert examination is carried out on the seized weapon. It is a Bersa 380, a semi-automatic pistol.
All political parties have repudiated the assassination attempt against the vice president, as well as social and human rights leaders.
“It is an enormous degree of madness and I hate what they tried to do to the Vice President,” her son and national deputy, Máximo Kirchner, wrote on Twitter. The parliamentarian also published a statement from the governing coalition, the Frente de Todos, in which they highlight that “the incitements made against her by different spheres of political, media and judicial power generated this climate of extreme violence.”
The Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, expressed himself in a similar way: “When hatred and violence prevail over the debate of ideas, they destroy societies and generate situations like today’s: an assassination attempt.”
From the opposition, former President Mauricio Macri has stressed that “this very serious fact requires immediate and profound clarification by the justice system and the security forces.” For his part, the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, has expressed his solidarity with Fernández de Kirchner and has also asked for a quick clarification of what happened.
The president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, will speak tonight on the national network through a recorded message.
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