On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge on Sunday he had violated his ankle monitoring the day before at his house arrest due to a nervous breakdown and hallucinations brought on by a change in his medication.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old leader’s preemptive jailing Saturday for he is taken into account a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for attempting a coup to stay within the presidency after his 2022 electoral defeat.
“(Bolsonaro) said he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wire tap within the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it,” assistant judge Luciana Sorrentino said, as reported in a Supreme Court document published on Sunday shortly after her online meeting with the previous president.
Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro told her he “didn’t remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in one other occasion,” and speculated it might need been brought on by a change in his medication last week. He once more denied that he intended to flee.
The document also says Bolsonaro also told the judge he hadn’t been sleeping well and was feeling “a certain paranoia” that stimulated his curiosity into opening the ankle monitoring device.
“(Bolsonaro) said he was together with his daughter, his elder brother and an aide at his house and none of them saw what he was doing to the ankle monitoring,” the document says. “He said he began to the touch it late at night and stopped around midnight.”
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De Moraes received information that the far-right leader’s ankle monitor was violated at 12:08 a.m. on Saturday. The arrest order got here hours later.
A panel of Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in September that Bolsonaro tried to stage a coup and keep the presidency after his defeat by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022.
On Monday, the identical panel will vote on the preemptive arrest order.
Bolsonaro’s meeting with an assistant judge on Sunday was procedural to debate the legality of his jailing, but in addition provided one other opportunity for his lawyers to argue he should remain under house arrest attributable to poor health. De Moraes has previously rejected similar requests.
De Moraes authorized Bolsonaro to be visited by former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who was out of Brasilia when federal police agents took her husband into custody.
Lula made his first comments about his predecessor’s jailing on the G20 group of countries meeting in South Africa. “The court ruled, that’s decided. Everyone knows what he did,” Lula told journalists.
Outside the federal police headquarters, some pro-Bolsonaro protesters held banners calling for Lula and de Moraes to be faraway from their posts, while detractors of the previous president celebrated his jailing.
–Savarese reported from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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