A photo found on Sabag Montiel’s cellphone showing him with the gun he used against Cristina F. de Kirchner.RR. HH
Fernando Sabag Montiel, the 35-year-old man who tried to assassinate Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last September, has just broken his public silence. His attempted murder trial is about to begin and while he has been in custody for the last five months, Sabag Montiel recently incriminated himself on television. “Imagine how nervous I was,” he said in a brief phone conversation with TV news channel C5N. “I pulled the trigger and the shot didn’t go off. The gun had five bullets,” he said.
Sabag also stated that he has no regrets for acting alone and insisted on keeping his girlfriend out of it. “Brenda Uliarte had nothing to do with it. I acted of my own free will, you know? You make up a story, I acted alone.”
Sabag Montiel and Uliarte are both on trial as alleged co-authors of the assassination attempt on the Vice President on September 1, as Fernández de Kirchner greeted a crowd outside their home. It was the week that prosecutors had indicted her on corruption charges and her supporters had spoken out in a show of force. Sabag Montiel infiltrated the crowd that Thursday night and attempted to shoot twice, just inches from Fernández de Kirchner’s face. “I cocked the gun and when I pulled the trigger it didn’t go off. In such a crowd, with so many people, I was nervous,” he said. He was arrested on the spot.
The TV station found his phone number through a letter that Sabag Montiel addressed to federal prosecutor Diego Luciani. Luciani has nothing to do with his case, but he became a media star after leading the prosecution that led to the December 6 conviction of Fernández de Kirchner on corruption charges. In the letter, which was leaked to the media, Sabag Montiel accused Judge Kirchner of handling his case and his attorneys for “seizing” him and cutting off all his contacts. He also asked Luciani to assign “judges he trusts” to the case against him. “I knew Luciani from TV,” Sabag Montiel told C5N. “It’s obvious that Luciani had issues with Cristina.”
Brenda Uliarte, 23, fled the scene but was arrested three days later. While many news outlets were busy debating whether Sabag Montiel was “a mad man on the loose” or if it was all a government conspiracy, investigators were pulling a thread that led to Uliarte. “I ordered Vice Cristina killed. It didn’t work out because she went back in. What a burden, I had it right there. I sent a guy to kill Cristi,” she wrote days earlier in a Whatsapp message to a friend: It wasn’t her first attempt.
“Next time I’ll pull the trigger myself, Nando [Sabag Montiel] failed. I know how to shoot well, my hands don’t shake,” she wrote to another friend on the night of the attack. Uliarte, who told the media that she was living with Sabag Montiel and that he wasn’t an exceptional guy, also told her contacts that she had a plan and enough money to escape.
Besides her, police also arrested four far-right activists known for leading violent anti-government protests, at which Uliarte was present. One of the suspects, Jonathan Morel, is a small business carpenter who Kirchner’s lawyers say has received millions of dollars in payments from a company with ties to former Liberal President Mauricio Macri.
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