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Rio de Janeiro:
Brazilian police on Thursday called for former President Jair Bolsonaro to be charged with plotting a 2022 “coup” to prevent current leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office.
A police statement said its investigators had concluded that Bolsonaro and 36 others planned a “violent overthrow of the democratic state”.
“Federal police on Thursday concluded an investigation into the existence of a criminal organization that acted in a coordinated manner in 2002 in an attempt to keep the then president in power,” the statement said.
“The final report has been sent to the Supreme Court with a request that the 37 individuals be indicted for the crimes of violent overthrow of the democratic state, sedition and criminal organization,” it said.
It is up to Brazil’s Attorney General to decide whether the allegations are substantiated enough to warrant criminal charges. The charge of attempted rebellion is punishable by up to 12 years in prison.
Bolsonaro vowed to “fight” against the accusation, and charged a Supreme Court judge with overseeing the case for violating the law.
“The fight starts with the Attorney General’s office,” Bolsonaro said on his X social media account.
The judge, Alexander DeMaurice, “leads the entire investigation, adjusts statements, arrests without charge, for evidence. He fishes and has a very creative advisory team that does everything the law doesn’t say,” Bolsonaro said.
According to police, the alleged plot was hatched in the final months of Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 presidency.
Lula, a leftist who was previously president between 2003 and 2010, won the October 2022 election to succeed far-right Bolsonaro.
The police statement did not make a direct connection between the alleged plot and the uprising that took place in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed the capital’s presidential palace, congress building and Supreme Court.
Investigations are underway into the upheaval, which echoed scenes in the United States two years ago, when Donald Trump supporters protesting President Joe Biden’s election victory stormed the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. .
Bolsonaro has praised Trump in the past.
The list of alleged co-conspirators in the Bolsonaro case includes the names of three elite soldiers and a police officer who were arrested on Tuesday in a separately announced case of conspiring to kill Lula and Maurice.
Trump parallels
Bolsonaro is the target of several investigations, but Thursday’s placement at the center of an alleged coup is the most dramatic.
He says he is innocent and a victim of “cruelty”.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has already been disqualified from holding public office until 2030 after making unsubstantiated claims of fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting system.
He has been banned from leaving the country while an extensive investigation called “Tempus Veritatis” (Latin for “time of truth”) is underway. The investigation has already caught up with many of Bolsonaro’s closest associates.
Bolsonaro hopes to overturn the disqualification and seek a comeback in the 2026 presidential election.
On X, he posted parallels between his situation and that of Trump, who won over American voters this month to secure a return to the White House.
A police investigation to indict Bolsonaro details an alleged order the former president is said to have given high-ranking military officers to arrest Morris in December 2022.
Morris headed the National Electoral Tribunal that certified Lula’s victory in 2022.
The order was confirmed by military officers in police interrogations, according to transcripts released by Morris, who is now in charge of the case at the Supreme Court.
According to a transcript released in March, a retired Brazilian army general, Marco Antonio Friar Gomez, spoke to police investigators about meetings he had with Bolsonaro in December 2022.
He said an aide to Bolsonaro had seen legal opinions the then-president had drafted in support of his bid to stay in power.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
