Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange has been arrested and removed from the Equador embassy in London.
BuzzFeed reported that UK police have confirmed Julian Assange was arrested on behalf of US authorities after the WikiLeaks founder was removed from Ecuador’s embassy in London.
On Thursday morning, Assange was dragged from Ecuador’s London embassy where he spent nearly seven years, after the country officially removed the activist’s asylum.
Police said Assange’s arrest was for allegedly breaching bail conditions relating to a Swedish case, but later confirmed he’d also been arrested on behalf of the United States, which had served an extradition request.
The UK Home Office also said Assange had been “accused in the United States of America of computer related offences”.
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Twitter users reacted to the arrest.
It’s heartbreaking to see the warrior of truth, Mr Assange being dragged out of Ecuador’s Embassy at the behest of the US. #FreeAssange pic.twitter.com/vA4jQ7VEyF
— Jοε Dafina (@joedafina) April 11, 2019
Assange exposed war crimes committed at the behest of neo-con warmongers.
It was the war crimes that harmed America's reputation, not Wikileaks.
This is perfectly in line with the non-interventionist, America first platform Trump ran on.
Trump must pardon Julian Assange.
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 11, 2019
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Images of Ecuador's ambassador inviting the UK's secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of–like it or not–award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books. Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom. https://t.co/ys1AIdh2FP
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 11, 2019
URGENT
Julian Assange did not "walk out of the embassy". The Ecuadorian ambassador invited British police into the embassy and he was immediately arrested.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 11, 2019
The continued imprisonment of @xychelsea is an utter disgrace. The arrest of Julian Assange represents an extremely dangerous crossing of the rubicon. This is an assault on journalism and a free press. All journalists should stand in fierce opposition.
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) April 11, 2019
https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1116322115739967488
Julian #Assange gets arrested for exposing US war crimes and publishing the truth, while mainstream media CEOs not only continue roaming freely after selling us lies for numerous catastrophic wars, but get to keep on doing exactly that with Venezuela and Iran. #Wikileaks
— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) April 11, 2019
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released reams of secret documents that embarrassed the United States government, was arrested by the British police on Thursday at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had lived since 2012, after Ecuador withdrew the asylum it had granted him.
The Metropolitan Police said that Mr. Assange had been detained partly in connection with an extradition warrant filed by the authorities in the United States, where he could face of a charge of computer hacking, according to an American official, if he is extradited.
President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador said on Twitter that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols,” a decision that cleared the way for the British authorities to detain him.
The relationship between Mr. Assange and Ecuador has been a rocky one, even as it offered him refuge and even citizenship, and WikiLeaks said last Friday that Ecuador “already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest” and predicted that Mr. Assange would be expelled from the embassy “within ‘hours to days.’ ”
The United States Justice Department has charged Mr. Assange, 47, in relation to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.
Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Mr. Assange, accused the United States of conducting what he said was “an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.”