Ecuador’s former regime reportedly tolerated Julian Assange
smearing poop on the walls of their London embassy before he was evicted
by the new government, an official from the South American nation said.
Ecuador’s Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo made the startling
claim about the WikiLeaks founder’s personal hygiene at a press
conference on Thursday after his asylum status was withdrawn and he was
dragged from the building.
During former President Rafael Correa’s government, “they
tolerated things like Assange putting feces on the embassy walls and
other behaviors far from the minimum respect that a guest can have,” Romo said, according to a CNN report.
On Thursday, Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno announced he had run
out of patience with Assange and was withdrawing his asylum status,
describing Assange as an “inherited” problem from his predecessor.
“The patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behavior of Mr. Assange.”
Moreno described Assange as “discourteous and aggressive” while
inside the embassy and accused him of confronting and mistreating
guards.
This is not the first time the Australian-born hacker’s personal
hygiene has been called into question. An International Business Times
report last January quoted sources who claimed Assange went days without
washing or changing his clothes.
“Julian ate everything with his hands and he always wiped his
fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my
whole life,” former aide Daniel Domscheit-Berg told the publication.
In 2011, a former executive editor of The New York Times described Assange as a “bag lady walking in off the street.”
“He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed for days,” Bill Keller wrote of their meeting.
“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off
the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants,
dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that
collapsed around his ankles.”
Assange is accused of spying on the Ecuadorian government,
installing electronic interference equipment in the embassy and blocking
security cameras.
The 47-year-old remains in police custody and will appear in a US
court via video link on May 2. He is wanted in the US for conspiring to
steal military secrets.
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