JERUSALEM — Damian Pachter, the journalist who broke the story of the recent death of an Argentine prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, has fled to Israel, saying he feared for his life in Argentina.
In a first-person account of the days before his flight from Argentina published on Monday in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Mr. Pachter said he concluded late Friday that he was being followed by an intelligence officer who “wore jeans, a jeans jacket and Ray-Ban sunglasses” and decided to leave the country immediately. He said that he bought a ticket to Montevideo, Uruguay, from Buenos Aires, and that he traveled on to Madrid and Tel Aviv.
After landing in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, Mr. Pachter told reporters waiting for him at the airport, “They are using their security forces to chase me.”
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Télam, the national news agency, also sought to defend itself from Mr. Pachter’s accusation that it had published invented comments, writing in a piece that it had never “alluded to a fake tweet.”
The conduct of Aerolíneas Argentinas, the state-run airline, was also criticized by opposition politicians. It was the airline that released the information about Mr. Pachter’s tickets. Julio Cobos, an opposition figure, said that releasing the information may have constituted a criminal act. He also pointed to the “complete irresponsibility” of the presidential palace’s Twitter account.
Jonathan Gilbert contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.