Police in Brazil were mobilized on Wednesday for an operation aimed at dismantling a criminal network that the Federal Police (PF) said was designed to assassinate political figures including former Justice Minister Sergio Moro.
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“The aim of this operation is to dismantle an organization that intended to attack civil servants and elected officials,” the PF specified, invoking plans for “assassination and extortion following kidnappings.”
“The attacks could have taken place simultaneously” in five Brazilian states, the federal police added.
Police sources confirmed to AFP that Senator Sergio Moro, ex-law minister to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, was one of the targets of this gang linked to the Capital’s First Command (PCC), one of the main criminal factions dominating the drug trade in Latin America.
This former anti-corruption judge tweeted a “CCP retaliation plan” against him and thanked the police.
In 2019, when he was minister, Mr. Moro ordered the transfer of the CCP’s historic leader, Marcos Willian Herbas, known as “Marcola,” and 21 other members of that faction to maximum security prisons.
A total of eleven arrest warrants were issued and nine suspects arrested. The police also carried out 24 searches, in the capital Brasilia and in the states of Sao Paulo (southeast), Mato Grosso do Sul (mid-west), Rondonia (north) and Parana (south), where Senator Moro is from.
Justice Minister Flavio Dino, appointed by left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in January, confirmed that police had “identified an assassination plot against several senior officials, including a senator and a prosecutor,” without naming them.
As a judge, Sergio Moro became famous for his role in the anti-corruption mega-operation Lavage Express.
In 2017, he sentenced Lula to more than nine months in prison for corruption and money laundering. The latter was imprisoned for 18 months in 2018 and 2019.
In 2021, the Supreme Court reversed all of Lula’s convictions, noting that Judge Moro had been “biased.”
This police operation quickly became the subject of political commentary against a background of strong polarization in Brazil.
Former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who was defeated by Lula in the last election, linked Moro’s assassination plot to the “left” without providing any evidence.
“2018 Jair Bolsonaro and now Sergio Moro. This can’t be a coincidence,” he tweeted, referring to the stab in the stomach he received during his first presidential campaign.
“Absolute power at any cost has always been the goal of the left,” added Bolsonaro, who is currently in the United States.