British police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Thursday, forcibly removing the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on a US extradition warrant and bringing his seven-year stint there to a dramatic close.
Video showed a heavily bearded Assange shouting and gesticulating as multiple officers hustled him into a waiting police van. He was arrested on charges that he skipped bail in the UK in 2012 and at the request of US authorities, London’s Metropolitan police said.
Officers moved in after Ecuador withdrew his asylum and invited authorities into the embassy, citing Assange’s bad behavior.
The US Department of Justice confirmed Assange had been indicted on a single charge of conspiring to steal military secrets with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who supplied thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
The Department of Justice said that the indictment, signed on March 6 last year and unsealed Thursday, alleges Assange conspired “to assist Manning in cracking a password” on classified Department of Defense computer systems. He has not been indicted under the Espionage Act, as his supporters had feared. Such a move