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The leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party says the government should oppose the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States.

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, told the BBC on Friday that the government should block the extradition on human rights grounds. Assange was arrested Thursday at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

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."

She says Assange is "a whistleblower, and much of the information that he brought into the public domain, it could be argued, was very much in the public interest."