New twist in the case Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Some of the documents on the espionage suffered by the founder of WikiLeaks have disappeared and which, according to two protected witnesses, was carried out on behalf of the CIAwhen Assange was still in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The news comes just twenty days before a crucial hearing on the extradition of Julian Assange, which will be held at the UK High Court on July 9th and 10th.
The disappearance of the documents was revealed by the Spanish newspaper El Paíswhich in 2019 was the first to come into possession of some of the espionage videos, which had targeted Assange, his wife Star and their first son, the WikiLeaks journalists, their lawyers and also us traditional media journalists, who worked on the secret WikiLeaks files. The publication of those videos by El País led to the opening of an investigation by the judicial authorities of Madridthe Audiencia Nacional, against the UC Global, the Spanish company that took care of the embassy’s security. Coordinated by the judge Santiago Pedraz, the investigation has been ongoing since 2019, so much so that the prosecutor’s office complained “the exasperating slowness of the police forces who have to examine all the seized materials”. But the problem is not just the slowness: according to the Spanish newspaper, the police did not hand over to Judge Pedraz all the files seized from the Samsung S7 phone, used by the head of UC Global, Davide Morales, to communicate with his alleged contacts in the CIA. Is this a technical error in the seizure of digital data or something else? Judge Pedraz summoned the police from the cybercrime unit to make a copy of the files on the phone in his presence to try to recover them and find out who is responsible for their disappearance.
The Spanish one is not the first anomaly of the case. Since 2015, the writer has been fighting a battle with the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) to access all the documents of the Julian Assange and WikiLeaks case. Thanks to this battle, the destruction of key documents by both the English authorities and the Crown Prosecution Service both on the part of the Swedish ones Swedish Prosecution Authority.
