Ronaldinho arrives in Rio de Janeiro after six months in detention in Paraguay

Former Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho Gaúcho and his brother and businessman, Roberto de Assis, arrived in Rio de Janeiro this Tuesday after having been detained in Paraguay for almost six months for using false documents.. Both arrived in Brazil accompanied by lawyer Sergio Queiroz on a private charter flight that took off from Asunción a few hours after they reached an agreement with the Paraguayan Justice to put an end to the process they faced and the National Defense Council (Codena) from Paraguay will authorize the flight.

The famous ex-footballer of clubs such as Barcelona disembarked at the international terminal of the Rio de Janeiro airport and refrained from making statements to the press despite the large group of journalists waiting for him there. Ronaldinho Gaúcho, wearing a mask, walked among photographers, cameramen and reporters without answering any questions And he boarded a private vehicle in front of the terminal that was waiting for him and in which he will probably go to the residence he owns in the affluent Barra de Tijuca neighborhood.

After arriving in Rio de Janeiro at around 4.30pm local time (7.30pm GMT) after a flight of about three hours, the three passengers went through the respective customs and migration procedures but separated before appearing at the disembarkation area in the that journalists were waiting for them.

Ronaldinho and his brother spent 171 days imprisoned in the Paraguayan capital accused of having entered that country with false passports. On Monday a judicial decision allowed them to return to Brazil, but they still had to wait for health authorization to be able to leave Paraguay, whose airports operate with restrictions due to measures to combat the coronavirus. The ruling of the guarantee judge Gustavo Amarilla, which benefited them with the conditional suspension of the process, put an end to the six-month judicial mess.

The procedural exit forces Roberto de Assis, who was sentenced to two years in prison, to appear every four months before the Brazilian judicial authorities. The two brothers will also have to pay a fine of about $ 200,000 for “social reparation.” to terminate its processes, an amount that will be allocated to the purchase of medical material to combat COVID-19. The amount will be extracted from the 1.6 million dollars that they paid in April as bail to access home confinement in the hotel in Asunción.

Brothers They arrived at the Asunción airport on March 4 after leaving Sao Paulo with Brazilian documentation, although the Paraguayan Immigration Office exhibited Paraguayan passports and identification cards with their names and photos, which, later, it was discovered, were manipulated.. The former soccer player had traveled to Asunción to lend his image to a project of free medical assistance to Paraguayan children organized by a foundation chaired by businesswoman Dalia López, who is a fugitive and under an international arrest warrant. The accusations of Ronaldinho and his brother led to the prosecution of about twenty people, including managers and officials of Migration and the Identification Directorate of the National Police of Paraguay, allegedly linked to an illicit document manipulation business.