The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, asked this Monday that the United States be “humanitarian” with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, who is imprisoned in the United Kingdom and is required by the American justice accused of espionage.
The president reiterated in his daily morning conference the offer of political asylum in Mexico to Assange and revealed that he even sent a letter asking for the activist’s forgiveness to Donald Trump before the end of his presidency in the United States.
“Before the administration of President Donald Trump ended, I sent him a letter asking him to be exonerated, to be forgiven (…). He had no response,” said López Obrador, who promised to release the letter.
He insisted that “the United States must act with humanism” since “Assange is ill and it would be a show of solidarity, of fraternity, to allow him to receive asylum” in some country, such as Mexico.
A year ago, López Obrador offered to house the programmer and activist, who is fighting a legal battle to avoid being extradited to the United States.
Assange and WikiLeaks came to light in 2010 after publishing hundreds of thousands of secret US documents on practices in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The computer expert, an Australian national, took refuge in 2012 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden to respond to an accusation of rape, which he rejected and was finally shelved.
In 2019, Ecuador withdrew his asylum and he was detained in a spectacular operation to be held in a high-security prison near London.
According to his wife, Assange would have suffered a small stroke on October 27, when an appeal from the United States was being examined in the extradition trial.
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