Brazil’s federal police said they indicted former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people for allegedly attempting a coup to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections.
Police said their sealed findings were being delivered on Thursday to Brazil’s Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet, who decides either to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial, or toss the investigation.
Bolsonaro told the website Metropoles that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the indictment, reportedly about 700 pages long.
But he said he would fight the case and dismissed the investigation as being the result of “creativity”.
The former right-wing president has denied all claims he tried to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022 to his rival, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro has faced a series of legal threats since then.
Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were indicted “to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news”.
Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides also were indicted, including General Walter Braga Netto, who was his running mate in the 2022 campaign; former Army commander General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, the chairman of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his veteran former adviser, Augusto Heleno.
Other investigations produced indictments for Bolsonaro’s roles in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring them and in directing a subordinate to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses.
Bolsonaro has denied any involvement in either.
Another probe found that he had abused his authority to cast doubt on the country’s voting system, and judges barred him from running again until 2030.
Still, he has insisted that he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit were heartened by the recent US election win of Donald Trump, despite his own swirling legal threats.
On Tuesday, Federal Police arrested four military and a Federal Police officer, accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a means to overthrow the government following the 2022 elections.
And last week, a man carried out a bomb attack in the capital Brasilia.
He attempted to enter the Supreme Court and threw explosives outside, killing himself.