Police probing an assassination attempt on Argentina’s vice president have arrested the girlfriend of the gunman filmed shooting Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Brenda Uriarte, 23, was held on Sunday night on a train at Palermo satation in Buenos Aires.
Investigating judge Maria Eugenia Capuchetti ordered the detention after being handed CCTV images showing Uriarte and her boyfriend Fernando Montiel reaching the former president’s home in the Argentine capital together before Thursday night’s bungled shooting.
The arrest coincided with reports claiming police and prosecutors believe Brazilian Montiel, 35, did not act alone and was aided by an accomplice.
Uriarte, who called herself Ambar online, had claimed before her arrest in an interview with Argentinian TV station Telefe she had last seen her partner two days before the shocking gun attack.
Footage shows a man identified as Montiel pointing a gun through the crowd while waiting for the Vice President outside her home in the upmarket neighbourhood of La Recoleta, before he was bundled away by security when the weapon jammed.
His links to extremist groups are being probed as part of the investigation after it emerged he had a neo-Nazi tattoo on his arm which linked him ideologically to the racist killer accused of murdering 10 Afro-Americans in May outside a US grocery store.
Sao Paulo-born Montiel’s Black Sun tattoo is the same symbol 18-year-old gunman Payton Gendron used in a manifesto issued before the Buffalo, New York shooting.
Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who killed 51 people and injured another 40 in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019, also had a Black Sun symbol emblazoned on his rucksack.
Uriarte is expected to be questioned over the next couple of days before being taken to court if prosecutors feel they have enough to pursue a case against her.
Her mobile phone was confiscated during the detention and will be analysed in the coming hours.
The brunette, who had died her hair blonde before her arrest, had appeared with Montiel in two TV interviews weeks before the gun attack.
She criticised benefit scroungers in one as she sold sugar candy in the street. In another, outside a cinema, her partner criticised the government and the woman he allegedly tried to kill.
Although Uriarte boasted during the interview of making decent money as a street seller, local reports said she was raking in cash selling “erotic content” on at least four different websites where she would offer to strip naked for payment.
