Jair Bolsonaro claims ‘psychotic attack’ made him tamper with ankle monitor

Tom Phillips in Brasília

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.

Federal police officers came to Bolsonaro’s house to execute an arrest warrant at about 6am on Saturday and he was driven to a federal police base where he is now being held.

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”.

Political observers and Bolsonaro’s political foes reacted to the claims with scepticism, noting how in a video shot early on Saturday the former president had offered a different version of events. In that footage, Bolsonaro can be heard admitting to a security official that he interfered with the equipment “out of curiosity”.

In the months before his coup trial, Bolsonaro and his supporters had been banking on the support of his most powerful foreign ally, Donald Trump, to help him avoid punishment.

Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods in response to what he called a “witch-hunt” against the former president, and imposed sanctions on several senior Brazilian officials. However, after meeting Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at the UN in September, Trump’s support for Bolsonaro began to wane, with the US president calling Lula “a very nice man”. Last Thursday, Trump rolled back tariffs on products such as beef and coffee in what was seen as a big victory for Lula.

After being informed of Bolsonaro’s arrest on Saturday, Trump gave a lukewarm response. “That’s too bad,” he told reporters.

The US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, criticised “the provocative and unnecessary incarceration” of Bolsonaro but there was no immediate sign of more severe retaliation from Washington.