Former Argentinian Foreign Minister Hector Timerman has passed away at the age of 65 after a battle with cancer, JTA reports.
Timerman died on Sunday at his home in Buenos Aires, according to the report.
At 23, he worked as editor in chief of a newspaper owned by his father, Jacobo, who was kidnapped in 1977 by the military dictatorship that ruled the country and released in 1979.
Shortly after his father’s arrest, Hector Timerman joined the struggle for human rights and was granted political asylum by the US In New York, he helped found Human Rights Watch and continued to work for his father’s release.
He earned a degree in international relations from Columbia University.
After the 2003 elections he became a supporter of then-new president Nestor Kirchner who named him consul to New York in 2004, and ambassador to the United States in 2007. He became foreign minister in 2010.
Timerman served as Argentina’s foreign minister in January 2013 when Argentina and Iran signed an agreement to form an independent commission to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center.
The plan was formally approved by both houses of the Argentine Congress, but never ratified by Iran.
Leaders of Argentina's Jewish community, which at 300,000 people is the largest in Latin America, criticized the accord. An Argentine court in 2014 declared the agreement to be unconstitutional.
Timerman later was named, along with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, in prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s 300-page complaint claiming a cover-up of Iran’s role in the bombing, which killed 85. Nisman was found shot dead four days after filing the complaint.
In late 2017, a judge ruled that Nisman was murdered and did not commit suicide.
In April 2015, Timerman quit his membership in AMIA, the Jewish organization which was targeted by the 1994 bombing, saying that if was due to the “obstructionist actions” the institution made against the deal with Iran to investigate the attack.
Timerman was placed under house arrest in December of 2017 over the alleged cover up of the Iranian involvement in the deadly 1994 bombing, and was released from house arrest in January of 2018.