On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro advised a choose on Sunday he had violated his ankle monitoring the day earlier than at his home arrest due to a nervous breakdown and hallucinations attributable to a change in his medicine.
Supreme Court docket Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old chief’s preemptive jailing Saturday for he’s thought of a flight danger. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in jail in September for trying a coup to stay within the presidency after his 2022 electoral defeat.
“(Bolsonaro) mentioned he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wire faucet within the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it,” assistant choose Luciana Sorrentino mentioned, as reported in a Supreme Court docket doc printed on Sunday shortly after her on-line assembly with the previous president.
Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro advised her he “didn’t bear in mind having a breakdown of this magnitude in one other event,” and speculated it may need been attributable to a change in his medicine final week. He as soon as once more denied that he supposed to flee.
The doc additionally says Bolsonaro additionally advised the choose he hadn’t been sleeping nicely and was feeling “a sure paranoia” that stimulated his curiosity into opening the ankle monitoring system.
“(Bolsonaro) mentioned he was along with his daughter, his elder brother and an aide at his home and none of them noticed what he was doing to the ankle monitoring,” the doc says. “He mentioned he began to the touch it late at night time and stopped round midnight.”
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De Moraes obtained data that the far-right chief’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 docket dominated in September that Bolsonaro tried to stage a coup and maintain 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 assembly with an assistant choose on Sunday was procedural to debate the legality of his jailing, but additionally offered one other alternative for his attorneys to argue he ought to stay underneath home arrest on account of poor well being. De Moraes has beforehand rejected related requests.
De Moraes licensed Bolsonaro to be visited by former first girl Michelle Bolsonaro, who was out of Brasilia when federal police brokers took her husband into custody.
Lula made his first feedback about his predecessor’s jailing on the G20 group of countries assembly in South Africa. “The courtroom dominated, that’s determined. Everybody is aware of what he did,” Lula advised journalists.
Exterior the federal police headquarters, some pro-Bolsonaro protesters held banners calling for Lula and de Moraes to be faraway from their posts, whereas detractors of the previous president celebrated his jailing.
–Savarese reported from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
