LIMA, Oct 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Disgraced former Peru president Alberto Fujimori underwent heart surgery Monday after his health deteriorated, said his daughter Keiko Fujimori, who is also his political heir.
“My father has undergone an operation, he has had a catheterization and a stent has been placed,” she told journalists the El Golf clinic.
She said the operation lasted about 50 minutes and that “it was found that one of the arteries was 70 percent obstructed, so it was necessary to place the stent.”
Fujimori’s doctor Alejandro Aguinaga had said earlier on Sunday that the jailed former leader “became unwell, he had an uncontrollably racing heart.”
The 83-year-old, who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity, was rushed to hospital on Friday night due to breathing problems.
Prison authorities had to give him oxygen.
“My father’s condition is delicate. His heart problem has worsened,” his daughter Keiko Fujimori — who in April lost a presidential election run-off for the third time — wrote on Twitter at the time.
Fujimori’s deteriorating health comes soon after Peru’s new left-wing government announced its intention to transfer him from his “golden prison” to one with fewer home comforts.
He is serving a 25 year sentence for two massacres committed by army death squads in 1991 and 1992, in which 25 people, including a child, were killed in a supposed anti-terrorist operation.
Fujimori was president from 1990 to 2000.
Imprisoned since 2007, Fujimori has long suffered from breathing and neurological problems and hypertension.
In May 2020, a court rejected a request from his family to have him released from prison due to the risk of contracting Covid-19.
Before her election defeat, his daughter said she would pardon her father if elected president. — NNN-AGENCIES
