Snowden to leave Russia as US demands handover

MOSCOW, Russia – US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden prepared to fly out of Russia on Monday to seek asylum in Ecuador, as Washington demanded Moscow hand over the fugitive to face espionage charges at home.

Snowden left Hong Kong on a commercial Aeroflot flight on Sunday and is said by Russian officials to have spent the night in a Moscow airport awaiting his onward connection.

Russian security sources said they had no reason to arrest the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, who officials described as an ordinary “transit passenger” who had not crossed the border.

According to Russian state media, he spent the night in the distinctly unglamourous “capsule hotel” Vozdushny Express located inside the departures area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

Snowden, the target of a US arrest warrant issued Friday after the IT contractor leaked details of US cyber-espionage programmes to the media, is reportedly booked on a flight to Cuba Monday from where he could travel on to South America.

Ecuador Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino confirmed that the leftist Latin American country, whose embassy in London is already sheltering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, was analysing Snowden’s asylum request.

“We will make a decision… we are analysing it,” Patino told reporters Monday in Hanoi when asked about the high-profile asylum request.

“We know he is in Moscow, we’re in talks with higher authorities,” Patino.

Ecuador’s outspoken leftist President Rafael Correa has championed the cause of Assange and his allies to the fury of the United States.

Ecuador-bound

The WikiLeaks website said it had helped organise Snowden’s safe exit and confirmed he “is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum”.

Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, legal director of WikiLeaks, condemned the pursuit of both Assange and Snowden as an “assault against the people”.

WikiLeaks confirmed that Snowden was accompanied by a British citizen named Sarah Harrison, whom it described as a “journalist and legal researcher” working with the WikiLeaks legal team.

Snowden abandoned his high-paying job in Hawaii and went to Hong Kong on May 20 to begin issuing a series of leaks on the NSA gathering of phone call logs and Internet data, triggering concern from governments around the world.

Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) under Chinese rule that has maintained its own British-derived legal system, said it had informed Washington of Snowden’s exit after determining that the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with Hong Kong legal requirements. – Rappler.com