LONDON — With dozens of London police officers seeking his arrest looking on, Julian Assange, the founder of Wiki-Leaks, took to the balcony of Ecuador’s Embassy on Sunday to condemn the U.S. government and cast himself as one of the world’s most persecuted whistle-blowers.
Surrounded by supporters shouting encouragement, Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador, did not directly mention Britain’s attempts to extradite him to Sweden to face accusations of rape and sexual abuse.
Several supporters asserted that the extradition efforts were a pretext to prosecute him in the United States for leaking classified government documents.
“I ask President (Barack) Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks,” Assange said, reading from a statement as he stood on the balcony. “The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation. The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters.”
A White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters Saturday that the Obama administration considered the standoff a matter for the governments of Britain, Sweden and Ecuador.
Assange’s remarks Sunday were his first public statements since he sought asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy.
Assange, an eccentric hacker who has been hailed as a champion of free speech and demonized as danger to public safety, burst onto the scene in 2010 when WikiLeaks posted secret documents on the Iraq war and classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict. It also made available individual cables — the daily traffic between the State Department and more than 270 U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world.
On Sunday, wearing a crisp blue shirt and a red tie, his white hair cut neatly, Assange used his 10-minute speech to criticize the recent prosecutions of those who have leaked classified materials.
Specifically, he hailed Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst accused of passing archives of classified documents to WikiLeaks. He called Manning a “hero” and “one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.”
“As WikiLeaks stands under threat,” Assange said, “so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies.”
While Assange has been holed up in the embassy, dozens of British police officers have taken up positions around the building, promising to arrest him should he emerge.
The standoff is the culmination of a nearly two-year drama that has embroiled Assange in an extradition case involving accusations of sexual abuse by two Swedish women — which he has strenuously denied — and a British Supreme Court ruling ordering that Assange be placed on a plane to Stockholm to face questioning in the affair.
