Angry Assange starts 5th year cooped up in London embassy
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is starting his fifth year camped out in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.
Assange, 44, is wanted for questioning over a 2010 rape allegation in Sweden but has been inside Ecuador’s UK mission for four full years in a bid to avoid extradition.
The anti-secrecy campaigner, who denies the allegation, walked into the embassy of his own free will on June 18, 2012, with Britain on the brink of sending him to Stockholm, and has not left since.
His lawyers say he is angry that Swedish prosecutors are still maintaining the European arrest warrant against him.
The Australian former computer hacker fears that from Sweden he could be extradited to the United States over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files, where he could face a long prison sentence.
A hero to supporters and a dangerous egocentric to detractors, Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and has been portrayed in two movies in recent years.
Assange has compared living inside the embassy - which has no garden but is in the plush Knightsbridge district, near Harrods department store - to life on a space station.
His 195 square foot room is divided into an office and a living area. He has a treadmill, shower, microwave and sun lamp and spends most of his day at his computer.
Last month a Stockholm district court maintained a European arrest warrant against Assange, rejecting his lawyers’ request to have it lifted.
Assange will appeal the ruling, one of his Swedish lawyers, Per Samuelsson, said.
“He is not surprised but very critical and angry,” he said.
Assange’s lawyers requested the lifting of the warrant after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a non-binding legal opinion on February 5 saying his confinement in the Ecuadoran embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain.
Assange is calling for Britain to leave the European Union in Thursday’s referendum on its membership of the bloc.
He alleges that British authorities “repeatedly use the EU as political cover for its own decision-making”, highlighting the European arrest warrant.
