by Tyler Durden
Friday, Oct 29, 2021

Julian Assange, the cofounder of WikiLeaks, was arrested and forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after seven years of hiding out in diplomatic and legal limbo. Over the course of nearly a decade, Assange has been charged with three central crimes by three separate governments. First, in 2010 he was accused of raping and sexually molesting two women in Sweden; second he is accused of violating bail terms in the United Kingdom; and third, and most recently, he is accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The U.S. is also investigating him for espionage, the publication of sensitive government documents and coordination with Russia.

As Staista's Florian Zandt details below, how Assange found himself in the Ecuadorian embassy began with the first accusation in Sweden, which caused Assange to leave Sweden for the United Kingdom. By the end of 2010, he turned himself into UK law enforcement and soon after he was released on bail. This set off a series of legal battles within the United Kingdom regarding whether the UK could extradite him to Sweden. Assange feared that the Swedish government would then extradite him to the U.S., where he could be charged with the WikiLeaks release of classified documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010.

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