Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has handed himself over to police to begin a 12-year prison sentence for corruption, according to local media.
The 72-year-old left on Saturday the steel-workers union building where he had sought refuge while defying for some 24 hours a court deadline to submit to custody, Aljazeera reported.
Lula was taken away from the premises in an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo in a convoy of black police cars, Globo TV reported.
An earlier attempt to leave the offices had been blocked by a crowd of supporters who opposed his arrest and blocked the exit of the building.
Lula is now expected to be flown to the southern city of Curitiba to start serving his sentence, where a “specially designed jail cell” awaited the former president.
His lawyers had lodged several requests to avoid jail until exhausting all appeals against his corruption conviction, which were all ultimately unsuccessful.
The leftist politician, who was president from 2003 to 2011, was convicted in July of corruption and money-laundering in connection with the renovation of a beachside penthouse he was planning to buy.
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