Jair Bolsonaro claims psychotic attack' made him tamper with ankle monitor

"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, Brasilia, 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."

"At Sunday's hearing, Bolsonaro claimed he could not recall having such a psychotic episode before and attributed the outbreak of paranoia to two medications he said he had started taking a few days earlier: a powerful analgesic and an antidepressant. Bolsonaro told the judge he had become convinced his electronic tag contained a covert listening device. After using the hand tool to damage the monitoring equipment, Bolsonaro said, he eventually gave up after snapping out of it."

Jair Bolsonaro was arrested at his Brasilia home amid suspicions he planned to abscond to a foreign embassy to avoid serving a 27-year prison sentence for masterminding a failed coup. Security officials detected tampering with his electronic ankle tag shortly after midnight, prompting a supreme court judge to order his arrest. Bolsonaro denied plotting to flee and said he had damaged the ankle monitor with a soldering iron during a substance-induced psychotic attack, blaming a powerful analgesic and an antidepressant he had recently started. Federal police executed an arrest warrant and detained him at a federal police base. He previously spent two nights in the Hungarian embassy in 2024, and political observers and opponents reacted with scepticism to his claims.

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