A former Bolsonaro Justice Minister arrested for the coup attack on his return from the US | International

Police commissioner Anderson Torres, who with the end of the Bolsonaro government ceased to be Minister of Justice, was arrested this Saturday morning in connection with the Bolsonaro assault by the three powers last Sunday in Brasilia. Torres was the secretary of Public Security in the capital when the mob invaded the institutions on the day that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was serving a week in the Presidency. The threatened coup caught him anyway in Florida, where he traveled with his family on vacation. The former minister turned himself in at the capital’s airport as soon as the flight that brought him from the United States landed. The Supreme Court, which on Friday also ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to be investigated for anti-democratic acts, accuses Torres “for fraudulent collusion” with the coup leaders.

The police searched this week the house of former Justice Minister Torres and located among his belongings a draft of a presidential decree that proposed placing the Supreme Court in a state of emergency that would allow the Government to intervene and reverse the result of the elections, which Lula won over Bolsonaro. by the hair. The suspect then explained via Twitter that the text of the minutes had been taken out of context.

Supreme Court Judge Alexander de Moraes, who is leading the judicial and police investigations into the invasion of the Presidency, Congress and the highest court, accuses the politician and former police chief of collusion and omission. Thousands of Bolsonaristas marched nine kilometers on foot from the Army headquarters, where they were calling for a coup, to the political and judicial heart of Brazil in a demonstration that the military police escorted and that turned violent at the doors of the buildings. They easily overcame the flimsy police barriers and stormed in, destroying everything in their path, including valuable works of art.

As he is a police commissioner, Torres has not been interned in a prison for preventive prisoners but has been transferred to a Military Police headquarters on the outskirts of Brasilia. There he will be indefinitely until he is convicted.

The afternoon of the invasion, when it was learned that the top political officer responsible for ensuring public security in the capital was on vacation and some of the police officers present were more interested in helping the assailants or being photographed with them, the governor, another Bolsonaro supporter , dismissed Torres. The governor himself, Ibaneis Rocha, was removed from office by the Supreme Court the next day.

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