HONDURAN Attorney General Johel Zelaya said on Monday that he had ordered authorities and asked Interpol to execute a 2023 arrest order for former president Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Mr Hernandez was released from federal prison in the United States last week after being pardoned by US President Donald Trump. 

The rightwinger had been sentenced by a US federal court last year to 45 years in prison for helping to ship tons of cocaine to the US.

Mr Hernandez went from supposed ally of Washington in the war on drugs to the subject of a US extradition request shortly after he left office in 2022. 

He was detained and sent to the US by current President Xiomara Castro of the social democratic Libre party.

The arrest order says that it must be executed “in the case that the accused is freed by United States authorities.”

Dozens of Honduran officials and politicians were implicated in the so-called Pandora case, in which Honduran prosecutors alleged that government funds were diverted through a network of non-governmental organisations to political parties, including Mr Hernandez’s 2013 presidential campaign.

A lawyer for Mr Hernandez, Renato Stabile, said in an email that the arrest order is a “shameful and a desperate piece of political theatre and these charges are completely baseless.”