Washington: Ecuador’s President on Tuesday accused Julian Assange of hosting numerous hackers at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to give them directions on how to propagate information on topics important to the WikiLeaks founder and his financiers. President Lenin Moreno said Swedish programmer Ola Bini, who is in custody in Ecuador, was one of the hackers who visited Assange many times.
Bini lives in Quito and was detained last week just hours after Moreno evicted Assange from the embassy, allowing him to be arrested by British authorities. Moreno said Bini hacked cellphones and online accounts belonging to both private citizens and Ecuador’s government.
In Quito earlier in the day, Bini’s parents made an anxious plea for authorities to release their son while expressing confidence he did nothing wrong. “Ola is a friend of Julian Assange, nothing more,” said his father, Dag Gustafsson. Moreno made his allegations at the Inter-American Dialogue during his five-day visit to Washington. He will not have meetings with officials from the Trump administration.