Bolivia ex-president Anez arrested in 'coup' probe

LA PAZ: Bolivia's former acting president Jeanine Anez was arrested Saturday on terrorism and sedition charges over what her predecessor and political rival Evo Morales denounced as a "coup" that unseated him.

Police were also rounding up former ministers who backed the conservative politician's caretaker government, which was in place for a year after Morales fled the country in November 2019 amid disputed elections, media reports said.

The arrests came months after Morales returned to Bolivia from exile on the back of a fresh election victory in October 2020 for the leftist Movement for Socialism (MAS) party he founded.

The presidency and congress are now under the control of MAS.

"I inform the Bolivian people that Mrs. Jeanine Anez has already been apprehended and is currently in the hands of the police," government minister Carlos Eduardo del Castillo wrote on Twitter and Facebook.

From a police barracks in La Paz, Anez sent letters to the European Union and the Organization of American States asking them to send observer missions to follow the case.

She asked them to "objectively and impartially evaluate the illegal apprehension of which myself and my two former ministers have been victims, on Friday and at dawn this Saturday," Anez wrote in the letters, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.

Morales, for his part, demanded in a tweet that the "authors and accomplices" of what he denounced as a "coup d'etat" against him be "investigated and punished."

Anez tweeted a copy of the warrant issued Friday by Bolivia's public prosecutor with the response: "The political persecution has begun."

She added the government was accusing her "of having participated in a coup d'etat that never happened."