A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the arrest of the capital’s public security chief after supporters of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro president led a rampage through government buildings, a source has told Reuters.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who was Mr Bolsonaro’s justice minister before taking over this month as the public security chief for Brasilia, where thousands of protesters vandalised the Supreme Court, Congress and presidential offices on Sunday. It was not immediately clear what the charges were.

The Supreme Court said it could not confirm the arrest warrant.

Torres was removed from office on Sunday after facing criticism that security forces failed to stop the invasion and ransacking of the key government buildings. Earlier, he had told local media on Sunday that he was holidaying in the United States with his family in Orlando, where Mr Bolsonaro is now staying.

Police in Brasilia continued to question some 1500 protesters held in an overcrowded gymnasium after they were detained as troops dismantled their camp opposite the army’s headquarters. Demonstrators set off from there on Sunday before storming the government buildings.

Protesters at the camp had called for a military coup to overturn the October election in which leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated Mr Bolsonaro, who made baseless suggestions of a rigged election.

Justice Moraes, who is running investigations of the “anti-democratic” demonstrations, vowed in a speech on Tuesday to combat the “terrorists” calling for a coup.

“Democracy will prevail and Brazilian institutions will not bend,” said Justice Moraes at the swearing-in of a new head of the federal police.

Yet the challenge of carrying out such an enormous criminal investigation into a loosely organised pro-Bolsonaro demonstration in the first weeks of a new government was already beginning to show.

Roughly 1500 detainees were held for questioning at a police gymnasium where they slept on the ground, some wrapped in Brazilian flags, and complained to a Reuters journalist that they were being held indefinitely and poorly fed.

Opposition Senator Marcos do Val, who has denounced the Brasilia attack as a blunder for the political right, told journalists that many of those detained were “paying for being in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

By late afternoon, 527 were arrested, while 599 detainees were released, most of them elderly people, mothers with children or people with health problems.

About 200 other demonstrators awaited charges in a penal facility for their role in Sunday’s rampage, which vandalised some of the capital’s most iconic buildings in the worst attack on Brazilian democracy in decades.

The violence stunned Lula’s government, which has been in office for barely a week, but Lula’s chief of staff, Rui Costa, said the government was back to work and policy decisions would be made on time.

The 77-year-old president accused Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters of trying to overthrow democracy and questioned why the army had not discouraged calls for a military coup. He accused some security forces of being complicit with rioters.

Mr Bolsonaro, who flew to Florida 48 hours before his term ended, was admitted to a hospital in the US state. He told CNN Brasil he might cut short his stay there due to his medical issues, returning to Brazil before the end of the month.

His son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, denied on Tuesday that the former president was responsible for the demonstration.