 |
| Spanish lawyer Baltasar Garzon, defence coordinator of the Australian editor of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, said there is "evident political persecution" against his client (AFP Photo/GABRIEL BOUYS) |
Madrid (AFP) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, arrested in London on a US extradition request, is the target of "political persecution," the man coordinating his defence said Thursday.
"There
is evident political persecution which started precisely with the massive
publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of cables and very serious information"
which Assange had published, including a trove of classified Pentagon documents
detailing alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Spanish
lawyer Baltasar Garzon.
"The
threats against Julian Assange for political reasons, persecution on the part
of the United States, are more current than ever," said Garzon, who also
accused Ecuador's president of lying about the reasons behind the revoking of
Assange's citizenship of the South American state, acquired in 2017.
Garzon, who
has previously described the case against Assange as arbitrary and baseless, is
a high-profile human rights investigator who was investigating magistrate when
former Chilean doctator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London on a Spanish
warrant for extradition to face genocide charges. The British government
ultimately rejected extradition on humanitarian grounds in that case.
British police arrested Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he had spent seven years as a recluse, claiming asylum and Ecuadoran nationality, both of which President Lenin Moreno revoked.
 |
A video
grab taken from AFPTV footage shows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
as he is
driven by British police to Westminster Magistrates' Court in central London
on
April 11, 2019 (AFP Photo)
|
British police arrested Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he had spent seven years as a recluse, claiming asylum and Ecuadoran nationality, both of which President Lenin Moreno revoked.
A London
court hours later found Assange guilty of jumping bail in 2012 while wanted in
Sweden on charges of sexual assault which were subsequently dropped.
"We
are very concerned because the Ecuadoran government and in particular its
president have not told the truth in the published statement" on Assange,
said Garzon, adding that Quito's arguments for justifying his loss of
citizenship were "false".
The US
Justice Department earlier had said Assange, a 47-year-old Australian, faced a
federal charge in the US and a jail term of up to five years for "conspiracy
to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified
US government computer".
The
indictment alleges Assange conspired in March 2010 with Chelsea Manning, a
former US Army intelligence analyst, to crack a password stored on Department
of Defense computers.
Timeline on #WikiLeaks founder #JulianAssange, after he was arrested by British police on April 11 pic.twitter.com/qlBZQvBrH0— AFP news agency (@AFP) 11 april 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment