Video shows a bearded WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday and placed into a police vehicle.
After the South American country revoked his asylum, Metropolitan Police said officers arrested Assange for failing to surrender to a court in 2012, as seen in video posted to YouTube by Ruptly, which is owned by Russian state-owned news outlet RT.
In a tweet sharing the video, WikiLeaks appears to quote Assange saying, “The U.K. must resist this attempt by the Trump administration.”
Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno said Assange’s asylum has been taken away due to “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life.”
Assange, 47, took refuge in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning in a sexual assault investigation. That case has since been dropped but WikiLeaks feared Assange could be extradited to the U.S.
The WikiLeaks founder, already notorious for leaking of U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, subsequently played a key role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections by released emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other Democratic officials. The U.S. intelligence community concluded in a 2017 assessment that WikiLeaks was used by Russia intelligence to release information as part of an effort to elect Trump. WikiLeaks denies this assertion.
“URGENT: Ecuador has illigally terminated Assange political asylum in violation of international law. He was arrested by the British police inside the Ecuadorian embassy minutes ago,” WikiLeaks said on Twitter. “Julian Assange did not ‘walk out of the embassy’. The Ecuadorian ambassador invited British police into the embassy and he was immediately arrested.”
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