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Facebook's Latin America vice-president leaves jail in Brazil

Xinhua, March 3, 2016 Adjust font size:

Facebook's vice-president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, left the Pinheiros Provisional Detention Center in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo on Wednesday morning after spending the night locked up.

Dzodan was detained on Tuesday morning following an arrest warrant issued by a judge in the northeastern state of Sergipe for allegedly not complying with a judicial order to release messages sent through WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook, concerning a drug trafficking investigation.

A new decision made by Sergipe's justice system granted the regional Facebook vice-president habeas corpus. Dzodan will face the rest of the process out of jail.

The executive spent Tuesday night in a cell for temporary prisoners which was separated from the other inmates. He left the detention center in a car.

Requested data is "essential to producing evidence that can be used in an organized crime or drug trafficking investigation," Brazil's federal police said on Tuesday.

The investigation began after drugs were apprehended in the city of Lagarto, Sergipe.

Four months before Dzodan's arrest, a Sergipe judge had asked Facebook to inform the judicial service of the names of people using a certain Whatsapp group, where messages were being exchanged about drugs.

Facebook ignored this request and hence received a daily fine of 13,000 U.S. dollars two months ago. Even after this measure, the company still ignored the judge's request. The fine was increased last month to 250,000 U.S. dollars per day.

Facebook has maintained that WhatsApp is operated independently, and that it has no staff in Brazil and does not store messages, making it impossible to comply with the court order.

Prison was an "extreme and disproportionate" measure, said Facebook's press officer in Brazil on Tuesday afternoon in response to Dzodan's arrest.

In December, another Brazilian judge ordered the WhatsApp service to be blocked nationwide for 48 hours after the company refused to provide information as part of an investigation into a user of the app.

At the time, the judicial decision provoked a wave of criticisms in Brazil and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, stated that he was "stupefied" and called it "a sad day for Brazil." Endit