Brazil’s supreme court has ordered that the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, be included in an investigation of the 8 January riots in Brasilia.
On Friday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes approved a request from the prosecutor-general and said that Mr Bolsonaro will be investigated as part of an inquiry into the alleged attempt to topple the country’s new government.
The prosecutor-general’s office cited a video Mr Bolsonaro posted on his Facebook two days after the riot of 8 January. The video purportedly claimed that president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — who defeated Mr Bolsonaro in the October election — wasn’t voted into office, but rather was chosen by the supreme court and Brazil’s electoral authority.
Mr Bolsonaro deleted the video the morning after he first posted it.
Thousands of supporters of Mr Bolsonaro broke through a blockade and stormed the presidential palace in the capital on 8 January. The uprising came just days after the inauguration of Mr da Silva, who was sworn in as president on 1 January.
Local media reported that the investigation would examine whether the former president was one of the “intellectual authors” of the 8 January attacks.
“Public figures who continue to cowardly conspire against democracy trying to establish a state of exception will be held accountable,” Justice de Moraes said.
The supporters of Mr Bolsonaro armed with metal bars and slingshots and ransacked Brazil’s congress, supreme court and the presidential palace.
A day after the riots, one palace employee said that the “whole place stank of urine and beer” as he described the scene when officials re-entered the building.
Mr Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Frederick Wassef, said in a statement to the Guardian that the former president had “always repudiated every kind of illegal and criminal act” and been a “defender of democracy”.
Meanwhile, Mr Bolsonaro has been quietly staying in an Orlando suburb since leaving Brazil in late December. He even skipped the 1 January swearing-in of his leftist successor, Mr da Silva.
The former president was hospitalised on Monday with an abdominal adhesion stemming from a 2018 stabbing attack, he wrote on his Instagram along with a photo of himself on a bed. He hasn’t posted about his health developments since, but he told a Brazilian media outlet on Tuesday that he would be returning to Brazil before the late-January departure he originally planned, the Associated Press reported.
Prosecutors said on Friday though Mr Bolsonaro posted the video after the riot, its content was sufficient to justify investigating his conduct beforehand.
