BUENOS AIRES (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th April, 2019) The health condition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was one of the reasons why the president of Ecuador decided to deny him asylum, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said on Thursday.
Assange was arrested in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London earlier in the day. The UK police confirmed that the arrest had been made "on behalf of the United States authorities." Ecuador had withdrawn asylum it had earlier granted to Assange.
"Seven years in a restricted area had an impact on Assange. We received information from various sources, which gave us a reason for concern, and this was taken into account when deciding to refuse asylum. We didn't want it to damage his health even more," the minister told reporters.
The authorities of Ecuador will publish explanation on the withdrawal of Assange's asylum in the coming hours, country's Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo told journalists on Thursday.
"In the coming hours, the government will announce a number of details that were not known to the world before, which will explain the decision taken by President [Lenin] Moreno," she said.
In particular, some details will be about the alleged meddling in the internal affairs of Ecuador by Assange and a company linked to him, Romo added.
"For several years, one of the key members of WikiLeaks and a person close to Assange lives in Ecuador. We have sufficient evidence that he was involved in attempts to destabilize the situation in the government and traveled to other countries with former Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino. Together they traveled to Peru and Spain twice a year last year. The last clue we got was that in late February this year, they went to Venezuela for one day," the interior minister said.
Additional details also include the identity and location of the two Russian hackers who live in Ecuador, Romo said.
"They [details] will be provided to the Prosecutor General's Office in the coming hours," she added.
Assange gained fame after WikiLeaks published a large number of leaked files, including some referring to US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and conditions in the Guantanamo detention camp.
Since 2012, Assange had been residing in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced a probe over allegations of sexual offenses. Assange denied those allegations and called them politically motivated. While the Swedish police dropped the investigation in 2017, Assange was still wary of being extradited to the United States.
