Swedish Software Developer Reportedly Close to Assange Arrested in Ecuador
The arrest comes just hours after Assange was taken into police custody in London.
Stringer/Reuters
A Swedish software developer who lives Ecuador and who is reportedly close to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Thursday, the Associated Press reports. According to a senior Ecuadorian official, the developer, Ola Bini, was apprehended at the Quito airport before he was about fly out to Japan. The arrest comes just hours after Assange was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and taken into police custody. It also comes in the wake of an investigation into a blackmail ring aimed at President Lenin Moreno. Earlier on Thursday, Bini called allegations by Ecuador’s interior minister that Russian hackers and a person close to WikiLeaks were working within the country “very worrisome,” adding, “This seems like a witch hunt to me.” According to the Associated Press, a man with the same name as Bini described himself in a blog post as a software developer for the Quito-based Center for Digital Autonomy, though he did not mention an affiliation with WikiLeaks.
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