Julian Assange fled to Venezuela’s London embassy soon after being accused of sexual assault and rape in Sweden

Britain is in high-level talks with Ecuador in an attempt to remove Julian Assange from its London embassy, where he has been sheltering for more than six years.

Ministers and senior Foreign Office officials are locked in discussions over the fate of Assange, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who claimed political asylum from Ecuador in 2012 and who believes he will be extradited to the United States if he leaves the embassy in Knightsbridge, central London.

Sir Alan Duncan, the Foreign Office minister, is understood to be involved in the diplomatic effort, which comes weeks before a visit to the UK by Lenin Moreno, the new Ecuadorean president, who has called Assange a “hacker”, an “inherited problem” and a “stone in the shoe”.

Sources