Outgoing Argentine President Alberto Fernandez said he received anonymous threats aboard the presidential helicopter last year. These threats came “after” the failed assassination attempt on its Vice President Cristina Kirchner in September 2022, the person concerned said.
Outgoing Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, whose term ends on December 10, claimed on Sunday that he had been anonymously threatened several times aboard the presidential helicopter over the past year.
“When I was president, on two or three occasions when I was flying by helicopter (from the presidential palace) from Casa Rosada to (the official residence of) Olivos, (the laser dot) of a rifle scope appeared in the helicopter,” Alberto Fernandez recounted the Argentine weekly newspaper Perfil. “I don’t think the intention was to shoot down the helicopter. I don’t know it. The intention was that I got the message that a telescope was pointed at the helicopter,” he added.
“We were silent”
Alberto Fernandez, who will be succeeded in two weeks by the controversial ultra-liberal Javier Milei, who was elected on November 19th, specifies: “This didn’t just happen to me once, it happened to me two, three or four times, with me.” Bodyguard , we saw it and were silent because we said to ourselves: ‘Let’s not make a problem of it’.”
These threats came “after” the failed assassination attempt on its Vice President Cristina Kirchner in September 2022, Alberto Fernandez added, without giving exact dates. On September 1, 2022, a gunman attacked Cristina Kirchner outside her home in Buenos Aires, but did not shoot. After that incident, Alberto Fernandez said he was “attacked with a laser beam (…) where someone with a weapon pointed the laser at” the presidential helicopter.
“We have to understand,” he told Perfil, that the families of political leaders “are constantly threatened on social networks or by email or by WhatsApp, constantly.”