Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has said “hallucinations” and a nervous breakdown led to an attempt to tamper with his electronic ankle tag.
The 70-year-old was placed under house arrest in early August, weeks before he was convicted for leading a coup attempt after losing his country’s 2022 election.
It was reported on Saturday that Bolsonaro had tried to open his ankle monitor with a soldering iron in an apparent bid to flee and avoid jail.
In a Supreme Court document published on Sunday, assistant judge Luciana Sorrentino – who had met with Bolsonaro online – wrote that the former president “said he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wiretap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it”.
The document also said Bolsonaro reported feeling “a certain paranoia” that sparked his curiosity in opening the monitoring device.
A still from a video which Brazilian officials say shows damage to the tag. Pic: Reuters
It added that the former president said he “did not remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in another occasion” and speculated that it may have been caused by a recent change in his medication.
He has denied that it was an attempt to escape.
“[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 reads. “He said he started to touch it late at night and stopped around midnight.”
Brazil’s ex-first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, visited her husband at the police headquarters on Sunday. Pic: PA
Bolsonaro had been expected to begin serving his 27-year jail sentence some time next week.
The Supreme Court received information that the far-right leader’s tag was violated at 12.08am on Saturday. It ordered for Bolsonaro to be detained hours later, deeming him a flight risk.
He is now being held at the federal police headquarters in Brasilia, where he was visited by his wife on Sunday morning.
Bolsonaro’s meeting with the assistant judge on Sunday was procedural but also gave his lawyers another chance to argue he should remain under house arrest due to ill health.
Similar requests have previously been rejected.
