British police have arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London after his asylum was withdrawn, the police said in a statement Thursday.
“Julian Assange, 47, has today, Thursday 11 April, been arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) at the Embassy of Ecuador,” police said.
Police said they arrested Assange after being “invited into the embassy by the Ambassador, following the Ecuadorean government’s withdrawal of asylum.”
Assange has been living at the embassy since 2012 when he sought refuge there.
Ecuador said on Tuesday it was reassessing Assange’s asylum claim, revocation of which paving way to his arrest for skipping bail.
The 47-year-old Australian sought refuge at Ecuador’s embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced accusations of sexual assault that prosecutors in Stockholm have since abandoned.
Assange has refused to leave the embassy to avoid extradition to the US to face charges over his website publishing huge caches of hacked State Department and Pentagon files in 2010.
Assange’s relations with his hosts have chilled since Ecuador accused him of leaking information about President Lenin Moreno’s personal life. Moreno has said Assange has violated the terms of his asylum.
To some, Assange is a hero for exposing what supporters cast as abuse of power by modern states and for championing free speech. But to others, he is a dangerous rebel who has undermined the security of the US.
WikiLeaks angered Washington by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables that laid bare often highly critical US appraisals of world leaders from Russian President Vladimir Putin to members of the Saudi royal family.
Assange made international headlines in early 2010 when WikiLeaks published a classified US military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.
Later that year, the group released over 90,000 secret documents detailing the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, followed by almost 400,000 internal U.S. military reports detailing operations in Iraq.
More than 250,000 classified cables from US embassies followed, then almost 3 million dating back to 1973.
