Brazil: The Supreme Court of Brazil has announced that the country’s former President Mr. Jair Bolsonaro will be investigated as part of an inquiry into the alleged attempt to topple the new government.
The ex-president will have to face an investigation for allegedly encouraging anti-democratic protests that ended in the storming of government buildings by his supporters in the capital, Brasilia.
In the wake of those attacks in Brasilia, Mr. Bolsonaro shared a video on social media that used false information to question the victory of leftist politician, Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
According to the statement from the public prosecutor’s office, prosecutors will investigate Mr. Bolsonaro, who is in the United States, for possible “instigation and intellectual authorship of the anti-democratic acts that resulted in vandalism and violence in Brasilia.”
Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who agreed to the request by federal prosecutors to launch the probe, remarked that “public figures who continue to cowardly conspire against democracy, trying to establish a state of exception, will be held accountable.”
In a recent statement, Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Mr. Frederick Wassef, claimed that the former president had “always repudiated every kind of illegal and criminal act and been a defender of democracy.”
The Supreme Court had already ordered the arrest of Mr. Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, Mr. Anderson Torres, for allowing the protests to take place in the Brazilian capital after he assumed responsibility for Brasilia’s public security. The federal district’s former governor and former military police chief were also targets of the Supreme Court investigation.