ALBA and the Wiki-fuss

Aug 19, 2012 10:32 Moscow Time

A group of Latin American countries have threatened serious consequences if British police attempt to storm the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The foreign ministers of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA) issued a special warning to Britain during their meeting in Ecuador.

The ALBA comprises Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Earlier this week, Ecuador granted political asylum to the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website Julian Assange, who took shelter in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in June fearing his extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations.

Assange has strong reasons to suspect Sweden to hand him over to the United States where he may face the death penalty on espionage and treason charges for publishing classified Pentagon files on Afghanistan and Iraq and secret U.S. diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks.

UK pays price for Assange row

The long-running row over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has set the British government back over $1.5 million, The Daily Mail reports. The price tag includes legal and court outlays of the past two years related to Assange’s extradition to Sweden, plus the cost of police patrols posted around the Ecuadorian embassy in London Julian Assange has been hiding in the past two months.

Julian Assange is to address his supporters and the media sometime later in the day.

Britain warned it would not allow the Australian out of the country.

From:Voice Of Russia

(Note by Karl Eklund: St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a Commonwealth nation)