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Police took Brazil’s convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro into custody early on Saturday after a supreme court judge said he was planning to escape from house arrest, days before he was expected to start serving a 27-year jail sentence.
Bolsonaro, an ally of US President Donald Trump, was convicted in September of plotting a coup with top generals in 2022, during his final months in power, to overturn an election defeat.
Trump described Bolsonaro’s prosecution as a witch-hunt, imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil and sanctioned the country’s supreme court judges, plunging relations between the two biggest nations in the Americas into crisis.
Brazil resisted the US pressure and convicted the 70-year-old hard-right former leader. Trump has since backed down on some of the tariffs.
Bolsonaro has been in poor health since a 2018 stabbing and was under house arrest while he exhausted the final appeals process. Police entered his home and took him to federal police headquarters in Brasília early on Saturday morning.
His son Flávio, a senator, had called on supporters to stage a vigil outside the ex-president’s house in an upmarket suburb of Brasília on Friday evening.
Invoking the “Lord of the Armies”, Flávio said in a video posted on X that the demonstration would pray for his father’s health and for “the return of democracy to our country”.
“We are going to ask God to apply his justice to those who persecute innocent people and help the real bandits to stay in power,” the senator said, in an apparent reference to the leftwing administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the target of the coup plot after defeating Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.
Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who led Bolsonaro’s prosecution, said in a ruling released on Saturday that Flávio’s demonstration “incites disrespect for the text of the constitution and court decisions, showing there is no limit to the criminal organisation trying to cause chaos and conflict and totally disrespect democracy”.
The ruling stated that shortly after midnight on Friday, monitoring equipment detected an attempt to remove Bolsonaro’s court-imposed electronic ankle tag. This, it said, showed “the convict’s intention to break the ankle tag to guarantee success in his escape, facilitated by the confusion caused by the demonstration called by his son”.
The US embassy was located only a 15-minute drive from Bolsonaro’s home, it added, noting that the ex-president had tried to seek asylum in the Argentine embassy during the criminal investigation which led to his conviction.
Fábio Wajngarten, Bolsonaro’s former press adviser, described the court ruling as “unbelievable” and “shameful”, claiming that the ankle tag was working perfectly on Saturday morning. He said the ex-president had taken medicine on Friday night for a hiccup attack, felt drowsy and had gone to sleep at 10pm.
Bolsonaro, who denied the charges against him during his trial, was expected to be taken into custody within days to start serving his sentence. The ex-president’s legal team had argued that he should serve his sentence at home because of his poor health.