08/15/2022 update at 18:30 CEST
Several teams meeting with the WikiLeaks founder at the Ecuadorian embassy in London were photographed and their conversations recorded by a Mike Pompeo company
A group of lawyers and journalists announced this Monday a complaint to the INCL and its then-director Mike Pompeowhom they accuse of spying on their conversations when visiting the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, while he was in asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
“We are complaining on behalf of several people who went to the Ecuadorian embassy to visit Julian Assange and, unbeknownst to them, all his teams photographed and their conversations recorded by a firm run by Mike Pompeo,” Richard Roth, one of the Australian’s lawyers, said at a news conference.
The 51-year-old activist remains in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison in London while his appeal against his extradition to the US is decided.
US authorities accuse the Australian twenty crimes for the information and documents he published on his website WikiLeaks, in which he exposed the abuses committed by US troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
extradition order
Between 2012 and 2019, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London until he was arrested in April of the same year an extradition order from the United Statesafter the government of this Latin American country stripped him of his political asylum status.
That’s where the alleged wiretapping took place, which allegedly involved a Spanish company, Undercover Global, which is responsible for the embassy’s private security. The company and its owner David Morales also appear as defendants.
protection protocols
As Deborah Kerbeck, one of the plaintiffs, explained on Monday, she went to the embassy several times “to discuss sensitive legal matters”.
“Upon arrival there was strict protocol for Julian’s protection. We were asked to hand over passports, cellphones, cameras, laptops, recorders and other electronic devices to the security guards in the lobby,” he said.
As they later learned, at the time it was allegedly “They disassembled our phones, removed and photographed SIM cards, and downloaded data from our electronic devices“, he added.
The lawsuit was filed this morning in the Southern District of New York alleging that Pompeo had “a extraordinary campaign of illegal espionage to Assange’s lawyers and others at the embassy.”
“Not only did Pompeo direct the effort, but his agents, with the help of Sheldon Adelson’s security team, also recruited David Morales, then CEO of UC Global, to implement the violations,” the plaintiffs say.