Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Facebook

US prosecutors have revealed the existence of a sealed indictment against Julian Assange

Nov 16, 2018 | Studies & Reports

US charges against WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange revealed

The existence of an indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been revealed, apparently inadvertently. The nature of the charges remains unknown.

US prosecutors have revealed the existence of a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, whose website WikiLeaks first gained notoriety when it published a trove of classified US government documents in 2010.

The disclosure came after Assistant US Attorney Kellen Dwyer made an unrelated filing on Thursday that contained calls for a judge to keep the filing against Assange sealed.

The document she filed to the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, said that, “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”

It also said that the charges would “need to remain sealed unto Assange is arrested.”

Wikileaks said the disclosure appeared to have been made in a “cut-and-paste error.”

It remains unclear what charges are faced by Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012.

Assange took refuge in the embassy in the face of efforts to extradite him from Britain to Sweden to be questioned over sexual molestation allegations.

He has regularly asserted that US prosecutors have filed secret criminal charges against him and voiced concern that Sweden could extradite him further to the US.

Officials in the current US administration under President Donald Trump have publicly called for Assange to be aggressively prosecuted over the leak of the government documents, some which contained sensitive material about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

tj/msh (Reuters, AFP)

DW

Related articles:

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Facebook