Assange held in British prison

LONDON (AP) — WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has told The Associated Press that Julian Assange is confined to a cell at Belmarsh Prison, a grim facility in southeast London.

He said conditions at the sprawling prison offer some advantages, however over the embassy where Assange lived for nearly seven years without taking a step outside. Assange was arrested Thursday.

And the WikiLeaks founder should finally be able to receive badly needed medical care for a shoulder problem and tooth pain now that he is out of the Ecuadorian embassy.

“There are medical facilities there, access to dental care I would assume and a garden to go out into,” he said.

He added that it is now much easier for Assange to meet with his legal team in prison than it was at the embassy, where a feud with Ecuadorian authorities had led to a ban of most guests.

He said Assange is in relatively good mental condition considering the recent stress.

Assange’s mother has taken to Twitter to call on authorities to be gentle with her son.

Christine Assange’s tweets on Friday say Assange had been deprived of fresh air, exercise and medical care. “Please be patient, gentle & kind to him” she asked of police and court personnel.

The 47-year-old hacker faces sentencing for jumping bail in Britain and possible extradition to the United States.

The fallout from the arrest extended to Assange’s associates.

An ace Swedish programmer who was an early, ardent supporter of Wikileaks has been arrested in Ecuador in an alleged plot to blackmail the country's president over his abandonment of Assange.

But friends of Ola Bini say the soft-spoken encryption expert is being unfairly targeted for his activism on behalf of digital privacy.

Bini, 36, was arrested Thursday at the airport in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito as he prepared to board a flight to Japan. The arrest came just hours after Assange was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Bini was carrying at least 30 electronic storage devices.

Authorities said the plot hatched with two unidentified Russian hackers living in Ecuador involved threatening to release compromising documents about President Lenin Moreno as he toughened his stance against the Wikileaks founder.

The international nature of the case has attracted attention in several other countries.

Assange’s French lawyer has appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron to intervene to bring the WikiLeaks founder from a London jail to France and help him avoid extradition to the United States.

Lawyer Juan Branco said on Thursday that Macron should offer mediation and to “take this man under our protection.” He said Assange has a small child in France.

France’s secretary of state for European affairs, Amelie de Montchalin, said Friday that while Europe has measures to protect whistleblowers, France hasn’t received a formal request from Assange. She said “we should listen to what he wants to do” but “we don’t offer asylum to someone who’s not asking for it.”

The leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party says the government should oppose the extradition.

Jeremy Corbyn said in a tweet that the U.S. is trying to extradite Assange because he exposed “evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Diane Abbott, Labour’s spokeswoman for domestic affairs, said Friday that the government should block extradition on human rights grounds.

Abbott says the U.S. case against Assange is about the “embarrassment of the things he’s revealed about the American military and security services.”