Swedish prosecutors had demanded that Assange be extradited for questioning, but a year ago changed their position and said they would question him in London.
Advertisement
Assange has been sheltering at the Ecuadorian embassy since June 2012.
More than four years after Ecuador offered Swedish authorities the opportunity to interview Julian Assange in the nation’s London embassy, a deal appears to have been struck Wednesday after Ecuador’s Attorney General responded positively to a request from the Swedish government to interview the WikiLeaks founder in the building.
“In the coming weeks a date will be established for the proceedings to be held at the Embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom”, according to a communique released by Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry, as quoted by Telesur media outlet.
Assange is wanted for questioning by Swedish police over sexual offenses stemming from his visit to the country in 2010.
The Wikileaks founder exhausted all his legal options in Britain to resist extradition to Sweden, and subsequently sought refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London as a last resort in June 2012.
Meanwhile, Assange’s lawyer, Tomas Olsson, said that his client appealed a Stockholm district court’s decision to keep a European arrest warrant against him over the rape charges.
“It means that a questioning can make the case go forward”, Rosander told The Associated Press.
There are now no charges filed against him in the US.
As the AP reports, “Assange’s defense team said in a statement that it welcomed the steps to take the WikiLeaks founder’s statement, which it said ‘comes after six years of complete inaction on the part of the Swedish prosecutor'”.
He believes the potential extradition to Sweden could be a ploy to then take him to the United States, where he is wanted over the release of thousands of classified USA documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on his website.
The British and Swedish governments have rejected the non-binding findings of the U.N’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Advertisement
However, the more serious allegations of rape will not expire until 2020 – meaning that if Swedish prosecutors do not ultimately drop their investigation, or if Ecuador does not surrender Assange willingly, he could remain in the embassy for another four years.
