BRASILIA, Brazil — On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge Sunday he had violated his ankle monitoring the day before at his house arrest because of a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in his medication.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old leader’s preemptive jailing Saturday, saying he is considered a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for attempting a coup to remain in power after his 2022 electoral defeat.
Bolsonaro “said he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wire tap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it,” Assistant Judge Luciana Sorrentino said, as reported in a Supreme Court document published Sunday shortly after her online meeting with the former president.
Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro told her he “did not remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in another occasion,” and speculated it might have been caused by a change in his medication last week. He once again denied that he intended to escape.
The document also says Bolsonaro 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 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 started to touch it late at night and stopped around midnight.”
De Moraes received information that Bolsonaro’s ankle monitor was violated at 12:08 a.m. Saturday. The arrest order came 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 same panel will vote on the preemptive arrest order.
Bolsonaro’s meeting with an assistant judge Sunday was procedural to discuss the legality of his jailing, but provided another opportunity for his lawyers to argue he should remain under house arrest due to poor health. De Moraes has previously rejected similar requests.
De Moraes authorized Bolsonaro to be visited by his wife, 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 at the Group of 20 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 removed from their posts, while detractors of the former president celebrated his jailing.
Savarese and Dumphreys write for the Associated Press and reported from São Paulo and Brasilia, respectively.
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