Snowden undecided on offer of asylum

MOSCOW — The WikiLeaks secretspilling site on Tuesday said NSA leaker Edward Snowden has not yet formally accepted asylum in Venezuela, trying to put to rest growing confusion over whether he had taken up the country’s offer.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has offered asylum to Snowden and says his country received a request from the former NSA systems analyst.

But Snowden, who is believed to be in a Moscow airport’s transit zone, has applied for asylum in a number of other countries as well, and it isn’t clear how easy it would be for him to travel to the Latin American country.

On Tuesday, prominent Russian lawmaker Alexei Pushkov tweeted that Snowden had accepted Venezuela’s offer, then deleted the posting a few minutes later.

It was not possible to immediately reach Pushkov, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee who has acted as an unofficial point man for the Kremlin on the Snowden affair.

But soon after the posting on his Twitter account disappeared, he sent another message saying his claim was based on a report from the state allnews television channel Rossiya 24, also known as Vesti.

The channel said Pushkov misunderstood its report on Maduro’s comments Monday night during a meeting with Panama’s president, which the anchorwoman introduced by saying “Venezuela has finally received an answer” from Snowden.

She then clarified that Maduro said Venezuela had received Snowden’s official request and showed a clip of him saying in Russian voice-over that Snowden “should decide when to fly to Caracas, if he indeed has decided to come here.”

WikiLeaks, which has been advising Snowden, said Tuesday on Twitter that Snowden had not formally accepted the Venezuelan offer, and that any decision on asylum would be announced by the “states concerned” and “then be confirmed by us.”

Pushkov, however, followed up with a third tweet that essentially repeated his initial claim: “As Vesti 24 reported citing Maduro, Snowden accepted his offer of asylum. If this is so, then he considered this the safest option.”

Pushkov had posted messages over the weekend encouraging Snowden to accept Venezuela’s offer, signalling that the Kremlin was now anxious to be rid of him.