Jair Bolsonaro asked to surrender passport in coup attempt investigation

Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been asked to hand over his passport as part of a police investigation into the attempted coup on 8 January 2023, which sought to keep him in power.

In operations that also targeted key allies of the former far-right leader, federal police agents carried out 33 searches and four arrests across Brazil on Thursday morning.

They visited Bolsonaro’s holiday home on the south coast of Rio de Janeiro, where he was given 24 hours to hand over his passport and banned from making contact with the other suspects.

According to Brazil’s media, military officers and high-profile members of the previous administration are among the targets of the operation, including Bolsonaro’s running mate in the 2022 election, Gen Walter Braga Netto. The president of the Liberal party, Valdemar Costa Neto, was also targeted and the party’s headquarters in Brasília were raided.

The four suspects taken into police custody reportedly include former aides to Bolsonaro.

In a statement, federal police said the operation, which was authorised by the supreme court, was looking into “a criminal organisation that attempted a coup d’état and the abolition of the democratic state of law, to obtain advantages of a political nature by maintaining the then-president of the republic in power”.

According to the police, the group disseminated disinformation about fraud in the 2022 elections before the vote took place “as a way of making a military intervention viable and legitimate”.

Part of the group acted to aid a coup d’état with the support of military officers who had knowledge of special forces tactics, the police said.

Speaking to a local radio station, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said it was vital to find out who financed the 8 January insurrection that aimed to unseat his government last year and that he did not think it would have happened without Bolsonaro. “We will await the investigations,” Lula said.

In comments reported by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper on Thursday, Bolsonaro said: “I left the government more than a year ago and continue to suffer from relentless persecution.”

The 68-year-old far-right populist faces a number of other criminal investigations, including a suspected jewellery embezzlement scheme. Last year an electoral court banned him from running for political office until 2030 over his peddling of lies and disinformation in the 2022 election.