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Minister of Foreign Affairs José Valencia and Interior Minister María Paula Romo accused Assange of driving scooters in the narrow corridors of the embbady, to have insulted the staff and filed dung on the walls.
But while Ecuador was fed up with his London guest in London, the reasons he had withdrawn his asylum in Assange and let in metropolitan police officers were probably more complex.
WikiLeaks had already harbaded the Ecuadorian authorities in another way. For months, Assange had filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government, accusing him of violating his rights by introducing strict new rules for life at the embbady. An Ecuadorian judge rejected these claims last October.
Quito was also irritated by Assange's support for the Catalan independence movement: his Foreign Ministry told Assange to refrain from making statements that could harm Ecuador's relations with the country. 39 other countries, including Spain.
More recently, Wikileaks became personal. On March 25, WikiLeaks posted a tweet drawing attention to a corruption investigation that President Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno is facing. It was linked to an anonymously registered website that hosted a multitude of emails, text messages and other documents about Moreno's privacy.
The Ecuadorian government has blamed WikiLeaks for the leaked documents, dubbed the INA papers, an allegation denied by WikiLeaks.
For WikiLeaks and its supporters, the Ecuadorian government attempted to use the leak of INA Papers as an additional pretext to end Assange's asylum.
Moreno denied any wrongdoing. The Attorney General's office has opened an investigation into the allegations. WikiLeaks denied any involvement in the publication of the INA papers, but that did not stop Moreno from pointing out Assange and WikiLeaks.
Assange does not have the right to "hack accounts or personal phones," Moreno told the Association of Ecuadorian Broadcasters on Tuesday
Over the weekend, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stepped up the speech against Assange by issuing a fiery statement rejecting "the false information disseminated in recent days on social media, often broadcast by an organization linked to Mr. Julian Assange. "
Relations between Assange and Ecuador further deteriorated Wednesday when WikiLeaks called a press conference and claimed that the group had discovered a spying operation against Assange since the embbady.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, told reporters that Ecuador had made secret video and audio footage of Assange and his exchanges at the embbady, including a medical examination and meetings with legal representatives.
"Greater treason"
Assange is Australian, but he was naturalized Ecuadorian in 2017. Less than 24 hours after the WikiLeaks press conference, Ecuador's Assange citizenship was revoked, her asylum canceled and embbady officials were invited the Metropolitan Police to force him out.
The actions against WikiLeaks were not taking place only in London. In Ecuador, the Interior Ministry announced that it had arrested a "close badociate" of Assange at the Quito airport while he was preparing Thursday for s & # 39; To fly to Japan.
Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo told CNN that the person arrested was Ola Bini, a Swedish software development company that she said had visited the Ecuadorian Embbady in London. many times.
Romo said at a press conference on Thursday that Bini, Assange and WikiLeaks were trying to destabilize the Moreno government. She accused Bini of working with Ricardo Patiño, Minister of Foreign Affairs under the government of former President Rafael Correa, who granted asylum to Assange.
"For several years, one of the key members of the WikiLeaks organization and a person close to Assange live in Ecuador," Romo said at a press conference.
Correa told CNN Thursday that his successor's decision to revoke Assange's asylum status was "the biggest treason in Latin American history, perhaps."
Hyperbole, maybe. But whatever the truth, the story of Assange's tumultuous 2488 days at the Ecuadorian embbady is not over.
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