Flávio Bolsonaro has reportedly left Brazil and is on his way to the United States, where allies say he plans to request political asylum, two days after losing Sunday’s presidential election to the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. People close to the family, reported that his plane was already in flight, though it did not say where it had taken off from.

Bolsonaro would land in Florida on Tuesday afternoon and that “the Donald Trump administration has been informed”. Folha de S Paulo reported that the escape had been “organized and enabled by a lawyer close to the Bolsonaro clan”, quoting people in the family’s inner circle who said the flight should land within hours. He had fled in the early hours of Tuesday with his wife and two daughters.

The senator had not been seen since Monday and missed an 11am deadline to surrender his passport to the federal police. A supreme court justice cancelled the document minutes after the election result, in a ruling tied to a criminal case in which the police are investigating him over a suspected money-laundering scheme worth about £680m ($905m) involving betting companies. During a meeting with friends and lawyers on Monday, Bolsonaro appeared “possessed and made it clear he was afraid of being arrested”. That same day he posted a video saying: “I never thought about leaving the country.”

Accounts of his route differ. IHe fled to Argentina on Monday night, expecting to board a private jet in Puerto Iguazú but the plane did not take off. The channel Todo Noticias said he crossed the border into Argentina on foot and dropped the flight plan once news of his movements leaked. With no record of him passing a regular Brazilian immigration checkpoint, the federal police are asking Argentinian authorities whether there is any trace of his entry.

Bolsonaro has yet to concede. Despite a thin political record, 48.21% of Brazilians voted for him on Sunday, a result many analysts read as both an anti-Lula vote and a vote for whomever Jair Bolsonaro had chosen. His brother Eduardo, in self-imposed exile in the US with an outstanding four-year prison sentence in Brazil over his lobbying of Donald Trump to sanction the justices hearing their father’s trial, had said last Friday that his brother should leave the country if he lost.