MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th April, 2019) Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said on Thursday that the Ruptly video agency, which is a project of the RT broadcaster, was the only media outlet that filmed the moment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's arrest, while no representatives of any other media were present near the Ecuadorian Embassy in London at the moment.
The UK police arrested the founder of the whistleblowing website in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been residing since 2012 fearing extradition, after Ecuador had withdrawn asylum that it had earlier granted to Assange. The arrest was made on behalf of the US authorities, wanting Assange jailed for the release of classified information.
"The fact that only we filmed Assange's arrest today is the most obvious verdict to the disgraceful state of the global media. While everyone has been waiting for his expulsion for days, they are now forced to show our shots," Simonyan wrote on her Telegram channel.
She posted a short video, which showed that there were no media representatives near the embassy at the moment of Assange's arrest, and only a Ruptly cameraman and a passerby were filming the arrest.
Simonyan added that CNN and The Guardian were "bold enough" to contact Ruptly by phone and ask how it had come that Ruptly had become the only agency to film Assange's arrest.
"You are shameless hypocritical servants of your establishment and not journalists at all. This is why, it has come out like this," Simonyan said.
Assange gained fame after WikiLeaks published a mammoth collection of leaked files, including those referring to US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and conditions in US-run Guantanamo detention camp.
