ANKARA

Lawyers of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva said new private messages between prosecutors involved in a corruption probe prove he was “victim of a conspiracy.”

Excerpted conversations revealed by Lula's attorneys showed prosecutors discussing how to block journalists from interviewing Lula in jail during last year's election campaign.

"The messages are directly related with the two clearly corrupted procedures that were initiated in the Federal Court of Curitiba (the Triplex and Sitio case) and inflicted unfair sentences to Lula," said his lawyers Valeska Texeira Martins and Cristiano Zanin Martins in reference to a case Lula was found guilty of allegedly accepting bribes for a beach-front apartment in exchange for government contracts.

Lula's lawyers said they would take the ''politically-motivated'' case to the UN Committee of Human Rights in a bid to annul Lula’s prison sentence and launch an investigation on the role of public officials involved in the leaked conversations.

The former popular leader of the Worker's Party has been serving a 12-year sentence since 2018 on alleged corruption charges related to the ongoing Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation in which executives of the state-run Petrobas oil company are accused of accepting bribes to award construction contracts.

Lula was set to confront current President Jair Bolsonaro in the election last year but was blocked by then-judge Sergio Moro who is now Super Minister of Justice in the Bolsonaro government.

Lula was leading the opinion polls in the run up to the 2018 election.

The Supreme Federal Court rejected two appeals to get Lula released in June.

The Workers Party ruled from 2002 until 2016 when the first female president of Brazil and a long-time comrade of Lula, Dilma Rousseff, was removed from office through impeachment two years into her second term.

Both Lula and Rousseff have called what has been going on in Brazil since 2016 impeachment a coup against elected leaders.