British Police Stop 24/7 Monitoring of Julian Assange At Ecuadorian Embassy (ibtimes.co.uk)

Ewan Palmer writes with news that police are no longer guarding the Ecuadorian Embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been taking refuge for the past three years. According to IBTImes: "London police has announced it will remove the dedicated officers who have guarded the Ecuadorian Embassy 24 hours a day, seven days a week while WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seeks asylum inside. The 44-year-old has been holed up inside the building since 2012 in a bid to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault charges. He believes that once he is in Sweden, he will be extradited again to the US where he could face espionage charges following the leaking of thousands of classified documents on his WikiLeaks website. Police has now decided to withdraw the physical presence of officers from outside the embassy as it is 'no longer proportionate to commit officers to a permanent presence'. It is estimated the cost of deploying the officers outside the Embassy in London all day for the past three years has cost the British taxpayer more than $18m."

Comments

It's a TRAP!

[Derekloffin]

Come on now, we all know they just replaced them with under cover officers...

maths seem off

[rmdingler]

It is estimated the cost of deploying the officers outside the Embassy in London all day for the past three years has cost the British taxpayer more than $18m.

So dollars, then? Six million a year for 24 hour surveillance. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

$684.93 per hour. Thank you Wolfram Alpha. This has the smell of one of those 1000 kilo drug busts that calculates the value of the seizure by multiplying by the gram price.

Re:Yeah, makes perfect sense...

[AK Marc]

Yes, it does. The charges kept changing to make them worse, but the version of the charges I read (translated, of course) indicated that it was rape because the woman withdrew her consent after the act. Such a chance of mind wouldn't be rape in the US. He lied to her to get her in bed, that sexual fraud is "rape" in Sweden, but not in most places. Some of the press releases by the police made the charges sound worse, which is why I read the charges themselves in their entirety (translated of course).