BRASILIA, Brazil
Brazilian authorities seeking to punish the mob that stormed the halls of power in Brasilia issued arrest warrants Tuesday for two former senior officials, one of them a close ally of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.
One of them is Anderson
Torres, who used to be Bolsonaro's justice minister and lately served as security
chief in the capital.
He was fired after Sunday's
stunning violence, which was reminiscent of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in
Washington, and brought global condemnation.
Anderson's failure to act as
thousands of Bolsonaro supporters overran congress, the presidential palace and
the supreme court is "potentially criminal," judge Alexandre Moraes
of the Supreme Court said.
He also issued an arrest
warrant for Fabio Augusto, who led the military police in Brasilia and was also
removed from his job after Sunday's mob violence. News reports said he is
already in custody.
"Brazilian democracy will
not be struck, much less destroyed, by terrorist criminals," the judge
wrote in his decision.
Torres was on vacation in the
United States on Sunday as the mob ran amok. On Tuesday he denied any
complicity in the events and said he will return to Brazil and defend himself.
Bolsonaro has also been in the
United States since the end of December, skipping the inauguration of successor
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
On Tuesday, Bolsonaro left the
Florida hospital where he had been receiving treatment for intestinal problems
stemming from a stabbing in 2018.
The security forces in
Brasilia have come under stinging attack over how they responded initially to
the riot. Video posted on social media showed some of them filming the violence
rather than intervening to halt it.
Justice Minister Flavio Dino
said around 50 arrest warrants had been issued for people not caught in the act
of pillaging and for others not present but accused of organizing the attack.
Police have arrested more than
1,500 people so far but said on Tuesday that "599 people were released,
mostly old people, people with health problems, the homeless and mothers with
children" on humanitarian grounds.
Most of the arrests took place
on Monday as police cleared protest camps set up in the capital.
Lula had condemned
"terrorist acts and criminal, coup-mongering vandalism" when he
returned to work at the pillaged presidential palace on Monday.
But on Tuesday he said
"Brazilian democracy remains firm," in a post on Twitter.
"Let's recover the
country from hatred and disunity," added the 77-year-old former trade
unionist, who took office on January 1 for his third term as president after
defeating Bolsonaro in the deeply divisive election.
Police said 527 people remain
detained while others were being processed.
Those that were released were
taken on buses to a bus station from where they would be able to return to
their home regions.
From one of the buses,
passengers shouted: "Victory is ours!" Some people put their arms
outside the vehicles with clenched fists - a symbol of resistance - or making
the "V" victory sign.
Other detainees were taken to
police stations to then be transferred to the Papuda prison complex, an AFP
reporter said.
"Now we're going to rest
and prepare ourselves for another battle because if they think they will
intimidate us, they are very wrong," Agostinho Ribeiro, a freed Bolsonaro
supporter, told AFP.
He said the detainees'
treatment at a police gymnasium where they were held had been humiliating and
compared it to a Nazi concentration camp, while blaming the rioting on
left-wing "infiltrators."
Hundreds of soldiers and
police mobilized to dismantle an improvised camp outside the army's
headquarters in Brasilia on Monday.
There, some 3,000 Bolsonaro
supporters had set up tents - used as a base for the sea of protesters who ran
riot for around four hours on Sunday.
Bolsonaro has alleged his
electoral defeat was due to a conspiracy against him by Brazil's courts and
electoral authorities.
Lula, who previously led
Brazil from 2003 to 2010, met with the leaders of both houses of Congress and
the chief justice of the Supreme Court on Monday. - AFP
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