© DR
“High tech terrorist” or hunted hero of freedom to inform, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who lost an important step in his battle to avoid extradition to the United States, saw his image clouded with the weather. The United States wants to try the 50-year-old Australian for a massive document leak. A British judge opposed it at first instance, citing a risk of suicide if he were extradited, but after assurances from Washington about his conditions of detention, the High Court in London overturned this decision yesterday Friday. Assange's lawyers, however, intend to appeal to the Supreme Court, according to his partner Stella Moris, who stressed yesterday that he had been deprived of his liberty for 11 years. The United States accuses Julian Assange of having disseminated, from 2010 on his WikiLeaks platform, more than 700,000 documents concerning Washington's military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces up to 175 years in prison and has been held in Belmarsh high-security prison in east London for two-and-a-half years. He had been imprisoned there immediately after being extracted in April 2019 from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had taken refuge seven years earlier, disguised as a courier. At the time he was facing rape charges in Sweden, which have since been dropped. During his years of seclusion in these diplomatic premises, Assange had two children with Stella Moris, one of his lawyers. His image as a white-haired "cyber-warrior" has blurred over the years, especially with his platform's 2016 release during the US presidential campaign of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic Party and the government. Hillary Clinton's team. These revelations had then aroused strong praise from candidate Donald Trump, who had launched during a meeting: “I love WikiLeaks!” According to the CIA, these documents were obtained from Russian agents, which the platform denies. This episode fueled the suspicions, by its detractors, of collusion with Russia by a Julian Assange, whose revelations are often made to the detriment of the United States, and who collaborated with the television channel RT, close to the Kremlin.
Agencies
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