Brazil’s Lula spends first day in Clash of ‘idiots’ in prison, already hoping to be free Uk-russia squabble
CURITIBA: Brazil’s leftist icon Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva served the first day of a 12-year prison sentence for corruption on Sunday, but was already hoping for a way out through the courts this week in a drama gripping the country ahead of presidential elections.
The 72-year-old, who served two terms as head of state between 2003 and 2010, entered the prison in the southern city of Curitiba l ate on Saturday, becoming Brazil’s first ex-president to be jailed as a criminal.
His cell is located in the same federal police building that serves as the base of operation “Car Wash,” Brazil’s wide-ranging anti-graft investigation that brought him down.
Although Brazil’s recent presi- dents have often ended up in trouble --impeached, felled by a coup and even one suicide -- Lula is the first to have been convicted and locked up. He was found guilty last year of accepting a luxury apartment as a bribe from a construction company and is the biggest scalp so far of the Car Wash probe.
He insists on his innocence and says he was framed to stop him running in the October presidential elections in which polls show him as frontrunner.
But there could be new surprises ahead, with a potentially explosive legal development coming as early as Wednesday when the Supreme Court could revisit the current law on incarceration during appeals, local media said.
Today, anyone convicted and losing a first appeal, as in Lula’s case, must conduct further appeals from prison.
But there is pressure to change that so that higher court appeals could be pursued in liberty, which would mean freedom for Lula. Lula’s new home, which measures roughly 15 square metre, has extremely good conditions by the standards of Brazil’s often violent, desperately overcrowded prisons. LONDON: As the condition of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia improved, leading lights of the Conservative Party and chief opposition on Sunday clashed on who was being an “idiot” for their positions in the row — foreign secretary Boris Johnson or Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Johnson used an article in The Sunday Times to rail against Corbyn, calling him “the Kremlin’s useful idiot” — the Labour chief insists apportioning blame should await completion of the probe into the poisoning attack, allegedly caused by a nerve agent associated with Russia.
Johnson wrote that Kremlin had made a “cynical attempt to bury awkward facts beneath an avalanche of lies and disinformation”, and claimed that the Russian government and stateowned media had invented 29 theories about the attack.
Other Conservative leaders also joined the attack on Corbyn.
In response, Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner told BBC: “Boris Johnson is the government’s useful idiot because actually, what he’s done is he’s created a situation where he has contradicted the evidence and overstepped the mark.”
Also on Sunday, the Foreign Office said it had received a request from Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko for a meeting with Johnson, but saw it as Moscow’s diversionary tactic. It would respond to the request “in due course”.