Brazil questions some 1,000 detained protesters after rampage in capital By Reuters

By Leonardo Benassatto

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian police on Tuesday have been questioning some 1,000 protesters held in an overcrowded gymnasium within the capital after anti-government mobs sacked public buildings over the weekend, because the nation’s new authorities labored to beat the disaster.

A lot of the supporters of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro have been detained on Monday as troops dismantled a camp in Brasilia the place demonstrators set off on Sunday earlier than storming Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court docket and presidential palace.

Protesters on the camp outdoors military headquarters known as for a army coup to overturn the results of the October election through which leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated Bolsonaro, who made baseless recommendations of a rigged election.

Supreme Court docket Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who’s operating investigations of the “anti-democratic” protests, vowed in a speech on Tuesday to fight the “terrorists” at work in Brasilia.

“Democracy will prevail and Brazilian establishments is not going to bend,” mentioned Moraes on the swearing-in of a brand new head of the federal police.

But the problem of finishing up such an infinite prison investigation right into a loosely organized protest motion within the first weeks of a brand new authorities was already starting to point out.

Roughly 1,000 detainees from the protest camp have been held for questioning at a police gymnasium the place they slept on the bottom, some wrapped in Brazilian flags, and complained to a Reuters journalist that they have been being held indefinitely and poorly fed. They sang and took selfies with their telephones, video posted on social media confirmed.

Round 200 different demonstrators have been below arrest and awaiting fees in a penal facility for his or her position in Sunday’s rampage that vandalized a few of the capital’s most iconic buildings within the worst assault on Brazilian democracy in many years.

Lula, who took workplace on Jan. 1, met on Monday night time with the top of the Supreme Court docket, congressional leaders and state governors in a present of nationwide unity to sentence the riots. They visited the ransacked Supreme Court docket constructing, which was the positioning most broken by the pro-Bolsonaro rioters.

The previous president was admitted on Monday to hospital in Florida the place he flew 48 hours earlier than his time period ended. He instructed CNN Brasil on Tuesday that he could lower quick his keep there resulting from his medical points and return to Brazil earlier than the top of the month.