Julian Assange is set to be kicked out of Ecuador’s London embassy and arrested within ‘hours or days’, WikiLeaks said this morning.
The website made the claims about its founder in a series of late-night Tweets citing unnamed sources in the Ecuadorean authorities as confirming Mr Assange’s seven-year stay would end imminently.
Protesters began descending on the west London embassy after online calls for people to ‘protect’ the controversial whistleblower.
Julian Assange, pictured on the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2017, is to be ‘kicked out’ according to Wikileaks, the group he founded in a tweet (right). Assange has been in the embassy since 2012 after Swedish authorities announced they wished to interview in connection with a rape allegation
Mr Assange claimed political asylum in the embassy in June 2012 after he was accused of rape and sexual assault against women in Sweden, and has been there ever since.
However earlier this week reports surfaced that the South American nation was tiring of his presence and claimed he had ‘repeatedly violated’ the terms of his asylum.
In their Tweets, WikiLeaks wrote: ‘A high level source within the Ecuadorean state has told that Julian Assange will be expelled within ‘hours to days’ using the offshore scandal as a pretext–and that it already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.’
Two hours later they added they have ‘secondary confirmation from another high-level source within the Ecuadorian state’ that Assange is to be booted out imminently.
Ecuador’s government said they never commented on ‘rumours’.
Mr Assange’s supporters claim the sex assault charges are a ruse to allow him to be detained so America can extradite him to face trial for revealing highly sensitive government information on his website.
Shortly after 2am, protesters began arriving on the west London streets that houses the embassy.
Two cars pulled up and activists erected seven tents on the pavement for the protesters to use.
The activists, promoted by a tweet from WikiLeaks, began their vigil although nobody had heard from Julian Assange himself.
One activist spent 20 minutes with multi-coloured battery-powered tealights spelling out ‘no expulsion’ on the pavement outside the embassy.
A single Metropolitan Police squad car kept watch over the slowly growing group, while a CCTV camera panned from left to right surveying the crowd.
The London force has rented an apartment overlooking the Embassy’s front door to keep the building under constant surveillance.
The news of his possible imminent expulsion from the embassy comes after Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno said on Tuesday that Assange has ‘repeatedly violated’ the terms of his asylum in the Andean nation’s London embassy.
Moreno told Ecuadorean broadcasters that ‘Assange cannot lie or, much less, hack into private accounts or private phones’ under the terms of his asylum.
The president said that photos of his bedroom, what he eats and how his wife and friends dance had been shared on social media.
But he did not accuse WikiLeaks of circulating hacked photos of his family and wiretapping his phone calls and private conversation.
The president said: ‘We should ensure Mr Assange’s life is not at risk but he’s violated the agreement we have with him so many times’.
Following the announcement calls were made on Twitter to fill the streets outside the building to protect Assange
But the Ecuadorean government has previously said it believes WikiLeaks of sharing the photos, some of which show photos which date back several years to when Moreno and his family live in Geneva.
Moreno said the terms restrict him from ‘intervening in the politics of countries, or worse friendly countries’.
The Ecuadorean government has directly referred to WikiLeaks in a complaint to a special rapporteur for the right to privacy.
On Tuesday WikiLeaks tweeted that Moreno would take a decision about Mr Assange’s fate ‘in the short term’ after it reported on an ‘offshore corruption scandal wracking his government’.
Mr Assange still fears extradition to the US due to his involvement in the leaking of a huge cache of classified documents in 2010.
He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him.
Ecuador has said its treatment of Mr Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation ‘cannot be extended indefinitely.’
In February Assange was issued with a new Australian passport clearing the way for him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Julian Assange’s fight for freedom: How is the WikiLeaks founder still holed up in an embassy after almost seven years?
August 2010 – The Swedish Prosecutor’s Office issues an arrest warrant for Assange for two separate allegations – one of rape and one of molestation. He denies both.
December 2010 – Assange is arrested in London and bailed.
May 2012 – Supreme Court rules Assange should be extradited to Sweden.
June 2012 – Assange take refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy on Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge.
August 2012 – Ecuador grants him asylum on ‘human rights’ grounds.
August 2015 – Swedish authorities announce they will drop allegations of sexual molestation because they no longer have any time to question him. The rape allegation stayed in place.
October 2015 – Britain calls off its round-the-clock police guard outside the embassy after three years and an estimated cost of £12m.
February 2016 – UN panel rules that Assange has been ‘arbitrarily detained’ by both Swedish and UK authorities.
May 2016 – A cat takes residence in the embassy with Assange.
May 2017 – Swedish prosecutors announce rape allegation has been dropped.
January 2018 – Assange’s lawyers argue that the arrest warrant for skipping bail was no longer relevant and should be withdrawn.
February 2018 – Westminster Magistrates’ Court rejects the claim and insists the warrant is still in place.
March 2019 – Ecuador accuses Assange of ‘repeatedly violating’ the terms of his asylum.
April 2019 – WikiLeaks said he faced being kicked out in ‘hours or days’.
JULIAN ASSANGE: AN EVASIVE & POLARISING FIGURE
By AFP
A heroic campaigner for openness, or an enemy of the US state trying to avoid justice: after a decade in the limelight, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains an evasive and polarising figure.
The 47-year-old Australian is again in the headlines after Ecuadoran President Lenin Moreno said he had ‘repeatedly violated’ the conditions of his asylum at the country’s embassy in London.
Assange, who won fame as the frontman of the whistleblowing website as it exposed government secrets worldwide, has lived in the embassy since seeking refuge there in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was applauded by transparency and anti-war campaigners for revealing the death of civilians, torture and clandestine military operations with the release of 500,000 US documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars.
But the United States and its allies accused him of risking lives by revealing information on sources, intelligence techniques and key infrastructure sites, with internal documents showing the US military considered him an ‘enemy’.
Human rights groups and newspapers that once worked with Assange to edit and publish the war logs were also horrified when WikiLeaks dumped the documents unredacted online, including the names of informants.
He was arrested in Britain in December 2010 on allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden, claims he strongly denied, saying they were politically motivated.
Before the claims were dropped in 2017, Assange expressed fears that any extradition to Sweden could see his eventual transfer to the United States to face trial for the leaks.
He took political refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012, but his hosts have grown increasingly irritated by his interventions on foreign affairs.
The Ecuadoran government eventually suspended his internet access last year, saying he had breached ‘a written commitment… not to issue messages that might interfere with other states’.
There are also questions about his relationship with Russia, with WikiLeaks identified in Robert Mueller’s probe into interference in the 2016 US election.
According to US Attorney General William Barr’s summary of his report, Mueller found that Russian government actors hacked Hillary Clinton’s campaign ‘and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks’.
EXPOSING ‘TRUTH OF WAR’
Born in Townsville, Queensland, in 1971, Assange has described a nomadic childhood and claims to have attended 37 schools before settling in Melbourne.
As a teenager he discovered a talent for computer hacking, and while has pled guilty to 25 such offences, he has only ever walked away with fines.
He created WikiLeaks in 2006 with a group of like-minded activists and IT experts, to provide a secure way for whistleblowers to leak information.
A confident speaker, he became its figurehead – and a lightning rod for criticism.
The most damaging leaks emerged in 2010, beginning with a video showing a US military Apache helicopter firing on and killing two journalists and several Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007.
It was followed by more than 90,000 classified US military files from the Afghan war, 400,000 from Iraq, and in November that year, around 250,000 US diplomatic cables covering almost every country in the world.
FACING JUSTICE
Although the sexual assault claims against him in Sweden were dropped, Assange still faces arrest by British police for having jumped bail, so has stayed in Ecuador’s embassy near Harrods.
He has described it as like living in a space station – he exercises on a treadmill and uses a sun lamp to make up for the lack of natural light.
In 2016 a UN panel declared that he had been detained arbitrarily, but critics have said his concerns of extradition to the US are unfounded. They say he is simply hiding from justice.
‘WikiLeaks was founded on exposing those who ignored the rule of law. Surely its editor-in-chief should recognise his duty to see it upheld,’ The Guardian newspaper, which once worked with him to publish the leaks, wrote in 2016.
Assange did, however, find growing support among previous critics on the right wing and online supporters of Donald Trump. That happened when the US government institutions with which he has been locked in battle also began to investigate the US president.
‘He is well aware that I thought he was waging war on the United States,’ said Fox News anchor and Trump favourite Sean Hannity.
‘My opinion of it has evolved largely because of what I have seen that he has done in 10 years.’
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