Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has told a judge that “hallucinations” provoked by a change in his medication led him to tamper with his angle tag while under house arrest for an attempted coup.
In a custody hearing on Sunday following his detention the previous day over the incident, the far-right former leader told a Supreme Court judge that he experienced a medicine-induced “paranoia” that led him to take a soldering iron to the device.
“[Bolsonaro] said he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wiretap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it,” said Assistant Judge Luciana Sorrentino in a court document published shortly after the online hearing with the former president.
Bolsonaro was under house arrest while appealing his conviction for a botched military coup after his 2022 election loss, but had been taken into custody on Saturday after police reports he had attempted to violate the ankle tag rendered him a potential flight risk.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the arrest hours after receiving information at 12:08am [03:08 GMT] on Saturday that the tag had been violated.
Bolsonaro denied he was trying to escape, telling Sorrentino that a mix of medicines prescribed by different doctors had led to the episode. He said he began taking one of them only four days before his detention on Saturday morning.
“The witness stated that, around midnight, he tampered with the ankle bracelet, then ‘came to his senses’ and stopped using the soldering iron, at which point he informed the officers in charge of his custody,” the court document said.
Sunday’s meeting was procedural in nature, but provided an opportunity for Bolsonaro’s lawyers to argue that the former president should remain under house arrest due to poor health. De Moraes has previously rejected similar requests.
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 Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022, sentencing him to 27 years and three months in prison.
On Monday, the same panel will vote on the pre-emptive arrest order.
President Lula made his first comments about his predecessor’s jailing at a meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) bloc of nations in South Africa. “The court ruled, that’s decided. Everyone knows what he did,” Lula told journalists.
