Will Britain refuse to send Assange to US until they hand over Harry ‘killer’?
JULIAN ASSANGE should be used as a pawn in the growing diplomatic row over the death of Harry Dunn, the teenager’s family have told Dominic Raab.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, in a meeting with the Foreign Secretary last month, the family demanded that Britain refuse a US extradition request for WikiLeaks founder Assange.
And they claim Mr Raab told them he was ‘reviewing all options’.
Relations between the family and the Government have cooled following this newspaper’s revelation that American fugitive Anne Sacoolas – who fled the country despite accepting responsibility for Harry’s death in a road accident last year – was a CIA agent.
Last month Washington refused a UK extradition request for Sacoolas to return to Britain to face justice over the crash outside a US spy base in Northamptonshire last August.
Her career in espionage is believed to be behind American officials’ blank refusal to send her back to Britain, but the family say they have been ‘misled’.
They are challenging the Government’s legal view that Sacoolas had
‘An extraordinary amount of hypocrisy’
diplomatic immunity in the High Court and have accused British officials of giving the police incorrect advice that allowed her to escape the country, and then of mounting a ‘cover-up’.
Dissident hacker Assange, who faces 175 years in prison in the US if found guilty of 18 national security charges, is due in Woolwich Crown Court tomorrow as the Government begins the process of handing him over to the Americans.
After spending nearly seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange was arrested last April and has been detained at Belmarsh prison since.
But even if the UK courts approve his deportation, Home Secretary Priti Patel can over-rule them, and she is under mounting pressure to link his case to that of Sacoolas.
Harry’s family have demanded that ‘the UK authorities block any further extraditions to the US, including the one of Julian Assange, until such time as Anne Sacoolas is extradited and back on UK soil facing the justice system here’.
Their lawyer and adviser Radd Seiger said: ‘Despite its disgraceful refusal to extradite Anne Sacoolas, the US continues to seek the extradition of people in the UK such as Julian Assange. In doing so, they are demonstrating an extraordinary amount of hypocrisy.’
He added: ‘As Dominic Raab told us when we met with him on January 27, “we are reviewing all options”. We want him now to exercise the option of not extraditing Julian Assange to the US.’
Allies of Mr Raab admitted the Assange case had been raised by the Dunn family at the meeting but insisted the two cases could not be linked and extradition terms do not allow any ‘quid pro quo’. And a Cabinet Minister warned that blocking Assange’s extradition ‘would drop a nuclear bomb in an already frayed special relationship’.
Separately, this newspaper can reveal that Mr Raab warned the family that Sacoolas’s links to the US government meant it was unlikely she would ever come back, but he stopped short of admitting she had been a spy. The family have branded the meeting ‘misleading’. When asked by Harry’s father Tim if Sacoolas was ‘more than a spouse’ – after reports that her husband Jonathan was an intelligence officer – Mr Raab insisted she had merely previously worked for the US State Department. He said: ‘She was an official herself, well, she was at one point.’ Mr Raab went on to warn that Sacoolas’s links to the US government meant ‘she is one of theirs’, and ‘the shutters have gone down – I think it is as crude as that’.
It comes as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee today announces a parliamentary inquiry into diplomatic immunity and extradition. Committee chairman Tom Tugendhat said last night: ‘How are we going to rebalance our relationship?
‘We need those who could evade the law to stay and help families come to terms with their grief.
‘And we need balanced treaties so that Brits facing trial in the US are dealt with in exactly the same way as Americans accused of similar crimes in the UK.’