Brazilian police raid ex-President Bolsonaro’s home, seize phone | Jair Bolsonaro News
Jair Bolsonaro says ‘surprised’ by search, as police said they conducted 16 raids in probe into false COVID documents.
Police in Brazil have raided the home of former President Jair Bolsonaro, local media and sources familiar with the matter said, as part of an investigation into falsified COVID-19 vaccination documents.
In a statement on Wednesday, federal police said they conducted 16 raids in Rio de Janeiro and the capital, Brasilia, targeting a “criminal network” believed to have “inserted false COVID-19 vaccination information into public health systems”.
The statement did not name Bolsonaro specifically.
Police said the false vaccination certificates, which occurred between November 2021 and December of last year, were “resulted in the alteration of the true COVID-19 vaccination status of the individuals in question”.
“As a result, the individuals were able to emit vaccination certificates and use them to evade health restrictions put in place by authorities in Brazil and the United States,” the statement said.
The vaccine investigation is one of several probes targeting the former far-right leader, a COVID-19 sceptic who during his tenure repeatedly downplayed the dangers of the virus and rejected the need for public health restrictions.
It may answer questions about how Bolsonaro, who vowed never to get a COVID-19 vaccine, was registered as vaccinated in health records made public in February.
Speaking to reporters outside his home after Wednesday’s raid, Bolsonaro said he was “surprised” by the search and reiterated that he never got a jab.
“For my part, there was nothing falsified. I didn’t take the vaccine. Period,” he said, adding that police seized his cellphone.
Brazilian television network Globo earlier on Wednesday broadcast images that showed police inside Bolsonaro’s condominium complex in Brasilia.
Two people familiar with the probe said police had arrested Mauro Cid and Max Guilherme, personal assistants to Bolsonaro as president who stayed on as his aides when he stepped down in January, the Reuters news agency reported.
“We trust that all doubts the Judiciary has will be clarified and it will be proven that Bolsonaro didn’t do anything illegal,” the leader of Bolsonaro’s political party, Valdemar Costa Neto, wrote on Twitter.
Bolsonaro, who lost a re-election bid last year to left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, also faces investigations into attacks on the legitimacy of Brazil’s electoral system and embezzlement of foreign gifts.
A mob of the former president’s supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in January in a bid to overturn last October’s election results.
The riot in Brasilia came after Bolsonaro for months falsely claimed that the Brazilian electronic voting system was vulnerable to widespread fraud – a claim rejected by judicial experts. The former army captain has rejected allegations that his rhetoric helped spur the attack.
