The New Yorker: Lukashenka arrested opposition leaders after getting docs from Assange’s associate


Julian Assange’s associate handed over thousands of documents to president Alyaksandr Lukashenka, which placed Belarusian opposition leaders in jeopardy, The New Yorker reports in an article devoted to the chief editor of the controversial website.

According to the article ‘Julian Assange, A Man Without A Country’, Israel Shamir, a ‘controversial Russian with extremist views’, visited Julian Assange in 2010. Shamir, who converted from Judaism to Greek Orthodox Christianity is an author of several anti-Semitic screeds. Some suspected that he had ties to Russian intelligence.

The authors state that Assange gave him more than ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables concerning Russia, former Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel. Shamir sold some of the material to a magazine friendly to the Kremlin, and delivered other parts of it to Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who used them to arrest opposition figures.

The New Yorker cites one Belarusian activist: “I really hate WikiLeaks. How can they do this? The KGB is telling these people, ‘Your name is in the American cables and you are a traitor, an American agent, and you will be treated like an enemy.’ ”

When Belarusian activists began contacting The WikiLeaks staff in panic, some wanted to investigate the matter, but Julian Assange allegedly ordered to say that Shamir ‘doesn’t have the cables’.

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