PERUVIAN JUDGE DUMPS REQUEST TO DETAIN KEIKO FUJIMORI

A judge on Monday (Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Manila) dismissed a prosecutor's request to take Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori back into pre-trial custody, radio station RPP reported.

Judge Victor Zuniga Urday told Fujimori to adhere to the conditions of her bail in the future. The public prosecutor's office said it would appeal the decision.

The right-wing populist politician, who looks set to narrowly lose the presidential election to hard-left candidate Pedro Castillo by at least 44,000 votes, had violated the conditions of her release from preventive custody in an ongoing corruption trial, prosecutors said earlier this month as they called for her detention.

Fujimori, who is being investigated for money laundering and obstructing the course of justice, is not allowed to contact witnesses or co-defendants as part of her bail conditions.

Prosecutors said she violated those terms when she appeared in public with former lawmaker and lawyer Miguel Angel Torres and with the former leader of the Christian People's Party, Lourdes Flores Nano, at a rally, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) also reported..

The powerful opposition leader, who is the daughter of former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori, is alleged to have headed a criminal network to launder illicit funds that the corruption-tarnished Brazilian construction company Odebrecht contributed to her 2011 presidential election campaign.

She has already been remanded in custody several times in recent years on corruption charges and spent more than a year in custody up until November 2019

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