Police have arrested another man due to the attack on Argentine Vice President Cristina Kirchner, now totaling four people detained for the incident, sources from the Airport Security Police (PSA) confirmed to Agência Efe on Wednesday (14).
Gabriel Nicolás Carrizo, presented by the local press as the head of a group of cotton candy sellers who were close to Cristina’s house when Fernando Sabag Montiel , the first of the detainees, approached her among supporters and twice squeezed the trigger of a pistol that missed inches from the face of the politician.
In addition to Sabag Montiel, a Brazilian of 35 years, his girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, an Argentinian 35 years old, and Agustina Díaz, 21, also Argentinian and a friend of Uliarte’s, had already been detained.
Uliarte and Sabag Montiel are accused of “having tried to kill” the vice president “with planning and prior agreement between the two”. Díaz, according to her lawyers, is also accused of “participating in the planning of the assassination attempt”, after investigators discovered a series of messages in which Uliarte allegedly confessed to her friend his plan to assassinate the former president.
Díaz’s lawyers assured that the client “at no time believed that what she said could be done”, considering that Uliarte was “manipulative”, and stated that Díaz learned of the attack “from the press”.
From the information provided by the seized cell phones, elements emerged by which the justice managed to establish that there was another attempt on the vice president’s life that was aborted.
Uliarte, the girlfriend of the main accused in the assassination attempt, had among her occupations the street selling of cotton candy, as she herself admitted in statements to the Crónica TV channel before the attack.
According to images publicized by the local press, the first time that a cotton candy cart was seen near Cristina’s house was in 23 August, at the beginning of the demonstrations in support of the former president, after a prosecutor had asked for a penalty of 12 years in prison against her.
A similar cart was seen again four days later.
According to local media, investigators work in the hypothesis that Uliarte was doing “intelligence” in the days before the attack, in order to provide information to Sabag Montiel.
The judge in the case, María Eugenia Capuchetti, decided to impose the secrecy of the investigation and on Wednesday accepted the vice president’s request to be admitted as a petitioner in the process.
