London, April 15: British police dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy last Thursday after his asylum was revoked, ending his seven-year stay there and opening the way for his extradition to the United States.
The United States wants Assange for one of the largest compromises of classified information in US history. The British criminal action against Assange will take precedence over extradition proceedings although Nick Vamos, lawyer at London-based firm Peters & Peters and former head of extradition at Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, said in practice it would make little difference.
The British judge gave the US government a deadline of June 12 to outline its case against Assange.
The courts will have to rule on any extradition request and Home Secretary Sajid Javid w ould dec ide which one takes precedence.Just hours after Assange’s arrest, US prosecutors announced charges against him for conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to gain access to a government computer.
The indictment, filed in March 2018 and unsealed Thursday, said Assange in March 2010 engaged in a conspiracy to help Manning crack a password stored on Defense Department computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a US government network used for classified documents and communications. Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, was jailed March 8 after being held in contempt by a judge in Virginia for refusing to testify before a grand jury in what is widely believed to be related to the Assange investigation.
Manning was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offences for furnishing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Former President Barack Obama commuted the final 28 years of Manning’s 35-year sentence. Assange was accused by two Swedish women of sexual assault and rape in 2010. After opening an initial investigation, prosecutors dropped it, only to reopen it and issue an European arrest order for Assange, who had left the country for Britain. Assange, who denied the allegations, fought through the courts to get an extradition order and the preliminary investigation dropped. His lawyers said he feared that should he go to Sweden, authorities could hand him over to the United States.