Bolsonaro asks Brazilians 'not to give ammunition' to Lula

Brasilia: Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro asked his supporters Saturday "not to give ammunition to the scoundrel," the day after popular leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva walked free from jail.

Breaking his silence on the release of his arch-nemesis, Bolsonaro told his Twitter followers: "Lovers of freedom and good, we are a majority. We cannot make mistakes." He added Lula was "momentarily free, but guilty."

Lula's dramatic exit from jail in the southern city of Curitiba on Friday came a day after a controversial Supreme Court ruling that could release thousands of convicts and undermine a sprawling corruption investigation called Car Wash.

A 6-5 decision overturned a rule requiring convicted criminals to go to jail after losing their first appeal.

Those convicts would remain free until they had exhausted their rights to appeal — a process critics say could take years in cases involving people able to afford expensive lawyers.

In an impassioned address to hundreds of supporters who greeted him as he walked out of the federal police headquarters, Lula, 74, vowed to keep fighting for poor people.

The former union leader who helped found the Workers Party (PT) also denounced the economic policies of Bolsonaro, who was

swept to power in 2018 in an election Lula had been widely tipped to win.

"People are hungrier, they have no jobs, people work for Uber or delivering pizzas on a bike," Lula said in remarks sometimes drowned out by cheers from the crowd and fireworks overhead.