Bolsonaro asks Brazil Court to return Passport for trip to Israel

According to his attorney on Thursday, Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who is being investigated for allegedly planning a coup, requested that his passport be temporarily returned so that he might go to Israel.

Attorney Fabio Wajngarten said on the social network X that Bolsonaro is requesting “for a fixed term” in order to accept an official invitation to travel to Israel with his family between May 12 and May 18.

The attorneys sent a petition requesting the action to Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Federal Supreme Court. Moraes is in charge of an investigation into whether Bolsonaro instigated a “coup attempt” to stop incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro’s opponent in the 2022 election, from taking power in January 2023.

On February 8, Bolsonaro’s passport was seized by police as part of the investigation.

Bolsonaro’s lawyers, who deny the coup accusations, said the “trip does not entail any risk to the process.”

Courts have barred Bolsonaro from running for public office, and the ongoing scrutiny by prosecutors led his critics to consider him a flight risk.

The New York Times newspaper on Monday published a report that Bolsonaro had slipped into the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia for two days after his passport was confiscated.

Bolsonaro is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who issued him an invitation to visit on February 26, amid a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Brazil.

Israel declared Lula a “persona non grata” after he compared Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the LatestLaws staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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