President Fernández denounces 'threats' against him in interview

Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez has revealed in an interview that he has been subjected to anonymous threats while travelling in the state helicopter.

Fernández delivered the revelation in a lengthy interview published on Sunday. In it, he revealed that a “telescopic sight” – most likely meaning a laser sight – had been trained on the presidential helicopter on multiple occasions while he was inside.

"While I was president, two or three times, while I was travelling by helicopter from Casa Rosada to [the official presidential residence of] Olivos, a telescopic sight appeared inside the helicopter," Fernández told journalist Jorge Fontevecchia in the Perfil newspaper.

Fernandez said the episodes occurred "after" the failed assassination attempt on his vice- president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in 2022, although he did not specify the dates on which the incidents had taken place.

On September 1, 2022, Fernando Sabag Montiel, armed with a pistol, mingled with Fernández de Kirchner's supporters outside her home in Buenos Aires and pulled the trigger of the gun only for it not to fire.

Fernández revealed that, after that attack, he had been targeted "with a laser beam, a target, someone with a gun pointing a laser at the presidential helicopter.”

"I don't think he intended to shoot the helicopter. I don't know. What he did want was for me to get the message that there was a telescopic sight pointed at the helicopter," claimed the Peronist head of state.

The president, who will leave office on December 10, said: "It didn't happen to me once, it happened to me two, three or four times, and we saw it with my [security] guards, and we kept quiet because we said: 'Let's not make a problem out of this.’”

"You have to understand," he said in the interview, that the families of politicians "live permanently being threatened on social networks or threatened by email or threatened by WhatsApp.”

An edited and translated version of the feature-length interview with President Alberto Fernández will be published in next Saturday’s edition of the Buenos Aires Times.