brasilia, brazil
AP
—
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge on Sunday, after spending a full day in prison, that he had violated ankle monitoring while under house arrest the previous day because of a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in medication.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Saturday ordered the 70-year-old leader to be pre-emptively imprisoned as a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced in September to 27 years in prison for attempting a coup to remain president after losing the 2022 election.
“(Bolsonaro) had a ‘hallucination’ that there was a wiretapping device on his ankle, and he tried to debunk it,” Assistant Justice Luciana Sorrentino said in a Supreme Court document released Sunday shortly after an online meeting with the former president.
Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro told her he “doesn’t remember having a breakdown of this magnitude on another occasion,” and speculated that last week’s medication change may have been the culprit. He again denied that he intended to run away.
The document also said Bolsonaro told the judge that he had not been sleeping well and was feeling “a kind of paranoia” that was fueled by his curiosity to open the ankle monitoring device.
“(Bolsonaro) stated that he was at home with his daughter, brother, and aides, but none of them saw what he was doing to monitor his ankle,” the document states. “He said he started touching her late at night and stopped around midnight.”
De Moraes received information at 12:08 a.m. Saturday that a far-right leader’s ankle monitoring device had been breached. The arrest order was issued several hours later.
A panel of Brazil’s highest court ruled in September that Bolsonaro had staged a coup to try to remain president after his defeat by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022.
On Monday, the same committee is scheduled to vote on the pre-emptive arrest order.
Bolsonaro’s meeting with an assistant judge on Sunday was a procedural one to discuss the legality of his imprisonment, but it also provided a new opportunity for his lawyers to argue that he should remain under house arrest because of his poor health. Mr. de Moraes had previously rejected similar requests.
President de Moraes granted a visit to former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who was away from Brasilia when her husband was detained by federal police.
Lula made his first comments about his predecessor’s imprisonment at a G20 meeting in South Africa. “The court has given its verdict and it is settled. Everyone knows what he did,” Lula told reporters.
Outside the federal police headquarters, some pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators held banners calling for Lula and de Moraes to be removed from office, while critics of the former president celebrated his imprisonment.
