Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has surrendered his passport as part of a police investigation into the attempted coup on 8 January 2023, which sought to keep him in power, his lawyers have said.
In operations that also targeted key allies of the former far-right leader, federal police agents carried out 33 searches and four arrests across Brazil on Thursday morning.
They visited Bolsonaro’s holiday home on the south coast of Rio de Janeiro, where he was given 24 hours to hand over his passport and was banned from making contact with the other suspects. Soon afterwards, police seized the passport at the headquarters of Bolsonaro’s Liberal party in Brasília, one of his lawyers told GloboNews.
According to Brazil’s media, military officers and high-profile members of the previous administration are among the targets of the operation, including Bolsonaro’s running mate in the 2022 election, Gen Walter Braga Netto. The president of the Liberal party, Valdemar Costa Neto, was also targeted and the party’s headquarters in Brasília were raided.
The four suspects taken into police custody reportedly include former aides to Bolsonaro.
In a statement, federal police said the operation, which was authorised by the supreme court, was looking into “a criminal organisation that attempted a coup d’état and the abolition of the democratic state of law, to obtain advantages of a political nature by maintaining the then-president of the republic in power”.
According to the police, the group disseminated disinformation about fraud in the 2022 elections before the vote took place “as a way of making a military intervention viable and legitimate”.
Part of the group acted to aid a coup d’état with the support of military officers who had knowledge of special forces tactics, the police said.
Speaking to a local radio station, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said it was vital to find out who financed the 8 January insurrection that aimed to unseat his government last year and that he did not think it would have happened without Bolsonaro. “We will await the investigations,” Lula said.
He added: “A lot of people should be investigated, because it is concrete fact that there was an attempted coup, there was a policy of disrespecting democracy, there was an attempt to destroy something we built so many years ago, which is the democratic process.”
In comments reported by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper on Thursday, Bolsonaro said: “I left the government more than a year ago and continue to suffer from relentless persecution.”
The 68-year-old far-right populist faces a number of other criminal investigations, including a suspected jewellery embezzlement scheme. Last year an electoral court banned him from running for political office until 2030 over his peddling of lies and disinformation in the 2022 election.
Bolsonaro repeatedly sowed doubt about the reliability of Brazil’s voting system and never conceded defeat after the election. He and his political party filed a request to annul ballots cast on most electronic voting machines, which would have overturned results.
The request was rejected and the head of Brazil’s electoral authority, Alexandre de Moraes, wrote in his decision that the challenge appeared aimed at incentivising anti-democratic protest movements and creating tumult.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
