Brazil’s former president says he took a soldering iron to electronic tag as he was hallucinating that it was bugged
Brazil’s far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro has claimed he took a soldering iron to his electronic ankle monitor after having a substance-induced “psychotic attack” that caused him to hallucinate that the device was bugged.
Bolsonaro made the claim during a custody hearing on Sunday, 24 hours after he was arrested at his home in the capital, Brasília, amid suspicions he was planning to abscond to a foreign embassy to avoid being sent to jail to serve a 27-year sentence for masterminding a failed coup.
The 70-year-old denied he had been plotting to flee his rented mansion, where he has been living under house arrest since August. Bolsonaro was found guilty by the supreme court in September of engineering a coup attempt and had been expected to be sent to prison in the coming days after a series of appeals.
However, at just after midnight on Friday, security officials detected that the ankle tag being used to track Bolsonaro’s movements had been tampered with. In the early hours of Saturday, a supreme court judge ordered the ex-president’s arrest based on suspicions he was about to make a break for one of Brasília’s foreign embassies. In 2024, Bolsonaro spent two nights sleeping in the Hungarian embassy for reasons that remain obscure.
