Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released reams of secret documents that embarrassed the United States government, was arrested by the British police this morning at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had lived for years, after Ecuador withdrew the asylum it had granted him seven years ago.
President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador said on Twitter that his country had taken the decision to revoke the asylum status that it had granted to 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 United States Justice Department has filed criminal charges against Assange, 47, related to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.
He also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail, and the Metropolitan Police said in a statement that Assange had been arrested by officers at the embassy on a warrant issued by Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2012, for failing to surrender to the court.
Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law. He has hidden from the truth for years. Thank you Ecuador and President @Lenin Moreno for your cooperation with @foreignoffice to ensure Assange faces justice
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) April 11, 2019
Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.
Assange took refuge in the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced questions about sexual assault allegations.
He has insisted that the accusations against him are false, and has said that the Swedish authorities intend to extradite him to the United States.
Sweden has rescinded its arrest warrant for Assange, but prosecutors have stressed that the case has not been closed and could resume.
{READ: Mueller links longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone to WikiLeaks}
In 2017, US intelligence agencies faced embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.
The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.
US officials have claimed WikiLeaks acts as a conduit for Russian intelligence and Trump sided with the website during the White House election campaign, praising the organization for publishing leaked Hillary Clinton emails.
During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Clinton’s campaign.
United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.