Quito: Ecuador announced that it withdrew the citizenship of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and accused him and Russian hackers of attempting to destabilise government.
Jose Valencia, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister In a news conference held in Quito, Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said that Assange had repeatedly violated the terms of his asylum.
"We have sufficient evidence that he has been collaborating with destabilisation attempts against the government," Valencia said.
Ecuador Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo said a close collaborator of WikiLeaks had travelled with former Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino this year to several countries — including Peru, Spain and Venezuela — in an attempt to undermine the Ecuadorian government.
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She did not identify the person but said their name and those of the two Russian hackers working in Ecuador would be turned over to judicial authorities.
She also said Ecuador's embassy in Spain and other diplomatic missions abroad have received threats.
Assange was forcibly bundled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and into a waiting British police van, setting up a potential court battle over attempts to extradite him to the US to face charges related to the publication of tens of thousands of secret government documents.
British police arrested Assange after the South American nation decided to revoke the political asylum that had given Assange sanctuary for almost seven years in its embassy in London.
His lawyer has previously said that Assange planned to fight any US charges against him.
Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail in Britain while facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations that have since been dropped.
British police said Thursday that Assange had been arrested for breaching his bail conditions in Britain and in relation to the US arrest request.
Assange for years has been under US Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks' role in publishing thousands of government secrets.
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He was an important figure in the special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe as investigators examined how WikiLeaks obtained emails that were stolen from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and Democratic groups.
Assange had not come out of the embassy in London for almost seven years because he feared arrest and extradition to the United States for publishing classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks.
Although Sweden has dropped the sexual assault case that first led to Assange's arrest in Britain, UK authorities said he would be rearrested if he ever left the embassy because he skipped bail in the original case.
