French police hunt for at least two gunmen after Alps murders

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LONDON: Two or more killers were last night being hunted over the murders of a family in the French Alps, as police continued to probe the dead father’s relationship with a brother and his work with a defence-satellite technology company.
While French authorities continued to insist they could not say if the killings had been the result of a professional hit, they confirmed each murder victim had received at least three bullets, including two shots to the head, a technique seen as a signature of assassination.
One investigator said: “We know the number of weapons that were used and the kinds that were used. Examination of the grooves on the cartridges and of the system for firing the bullet shows there was more than one killer.”
The seven-year-old daughter of the family, Zainab, was reported to be out of danger following operations to repair a fractured skull. Police said it was not yet known how she had been bludgeoned. There has been speculation she was pistol-whipped. Eric Maillaud, the chief prosecutor overseeing the investigation, said of speculation that Zainab might have been tortured to force her parents to reveal something, said, “This is not the main hypothesis.”
Last Wednesday, British-based aeronautics engineer Saad al-Hilli, 50, his wife Iqbal, 47, their two daughters and a 77-year-old woman thought to be Iqbal’s mother were on holidays in the Alps near Lake Annecy when they were attacked by gunmen.
A cyclist, Sylvain Mollier, 45, is believed to have been passing on the same road but apparently became a witness and was also murdered. He took seven bullets.
The younger daughter, four-year-old Zeena, was found crouching under her mother’s legs eight hours after the bodies were discovered in a BMW near the village of Chevaline.
The Mail on Sunday reported that Mr al-Hilli was working on a secret contract for one of Europe’s biggest defence companies, Surrey Satellites Technology. The newspaper said he was part of a team involved in an undisclosed project linked to European Aeronautic Defence and Space, a company that has contracts with Russia, China and the Foreign Office. Its clients include NASA, the European Space Agency and the British Ministry of Defence contractor Thales.
Claude Moniquet, the director of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, said, “Mr al-Hilli’s company was also a renowned leader in satellite mapping, and if it was secretly doing this in countries which would not welcome such an intrusion, then we have a possible motive.” He also suggested Middle-Eastern groups might have pressured the Iraqi-born Mr al-Hilli for access to technology and killed him for refusing.
Meanwhile Mr al-Hilli’s brother Zaid, who had previously issued a legal caveat to delay the settling of his father’s will, denied a family feud. A cousin who lives in Australia, Ali al-Hilli, told London’s Telegraph that Zaid was in tears when he spoke to him on the telephone after the killings. “He kept saying, ‘Why? Why? Why? How did this happen? … He was clearly devastated. He wasn’t coping.” Ali al-Hilli said he knew of no disagreement over money. He said Zaid al-Hilli was innocent and intended to care for the girls.
Police continued a detailed search of the al-Hillis’ home in Claygate, Surrey, while French police widened their search to Italy and Switzerland, with Mr Maillaud saying it was possible the killers had fled across borders that were only 90 minutes away.
Mr Maillaud said Zeena would soon re-join relatives who had travelled to France to take her home. Zainab, a “key witness”, was still in hospital in an induced coma, he said.
A former head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, John O’Connor, told The Independent he believed the murders were probably the result of a state-sponsored assassination.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

GENERATION LOST?

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WHEN Eva Valiente finished her university studies in advertising, she fired off written applications to 200 companies in Madrid. She did not get a single reply. So Valiente got part-time work with a chain of fashion shops. They sacked her when she turned 25 — she was too old for their look now, they said.
“It is illegal but the laws are weak for beginning people,” she says, with the hard-earned wisdom of a 26-year-old.
She tells of a friend who was offered a “job” in which she would work from 9am to 9pm five days a week — and get no salary for a year. Talking of the desperation of young Spaniards for work, she says “it’s for crying.”
Spain’s youth unemployment rate is a staggering 53 per cent, the highest in the 17-member eurozone. Among the jobless are Valiente’s boyfriend, a qualified lawyer who has never had work in his field, and two of her sisters: one a graphic designer who has never worked and the other a psychologist who recently lost her job. All of this in a middle-class, educated family — Valiente’s father is a doctor.
The eurozone now has a total of 3.3 million young people who cannot find work. Leading this dismal set of statistics are Spain and its fellow victim of financial crisis, Greece (52.8 per cent). With half the eurozone nations in recession, there are now enough unemployed people of all ages to make up a middling-sized country: 25 million.
There are warnings of a “lost generation” from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development. In a report in July, it demanded urgent action to stop the cyclic jobless problem becoming permanent, particularly for young people. “We need to avoid the risk of a lost generation by all means,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria.
An alarming report by the World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2012, used even tougher language. It warns that with unemployment and systemic financial crises, the world is sowing “the seeds of dystopia”, defined as “the opposite of utopia, a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope”.
The report, based on the views of 469 leaders from industry, government, academia and NGOs, warned that rapid global changes risked producing misery for much of humanity. The risks included “a large youth population [that] contends with chronic, high levels of unemployment, while concurrently the largest population of retirees in history becomes dependent upon already heavily indebted governments.
“Both young and old could face an income gap, as well as a skills gap so wide as to threaten social and political stability.”
Declining economic conditions could jeopardise the social contracts between states and citizens and increase nationalism and populism. The Forum warned of the emergence of “critical fragile states — formerly wealthy countries that descend into lawlessness and unrest as they become unable to meet their social and fiscal obligations”.
The number one risk to global stability, according to the report? Major systemic financial failure — that is, the collapse of finance or banking institutions, or even a whole currency.
All of which leads back to Spain and its potential to wreak economic disaster upon the rest of Europe and, perhaps, the world.
Madrid does not look like the capital of a struggling nation. Its broad, proud boulevards and graceful old buildings speak of majestic confidence. Its pavements are smooth and its many public gardens green and manicured, despite a summer so hot that there have been bushfires in the provinces. Madrid does not seem to have in any numbers beggars such as the Romanies on Parisian streets, or the English homeless holding out plastic cups for coins in London.
But Spain is suffering. While Greece’s public writhing under the agonies of austerity in a recession has been the focus of headlines, this is because if the eurozone falls, Greece is likely to be the first domino. In many ways, however, Spain is the bigger worry.
Greece is a small nation and accounts for only 3 per cent of the eurozone economy. While its exit from the euro might trigger a crisis of confidence in Europe’s financial markets, the euro would have a chance of surviving it. But Spain is Europe’s fourth-largest economy and is widely considered too big to bail.
That did not stop the European Central Bank deciding in June to lend Spain up to €100 billion to help its struggling banks in an attempt to ward off a more serious emergency.
Spain is in financial crisis — and Valiente and her family and friends are out of work — because of what Spaniards call “the brick bubble”. When Spain joined the euro, credit became cheap as the European Central Bank kept interest rates low for the whole zone. Spaniards bought property, leading to a construction boom. In 2007 came the bust.
Credit tightened. People stopped buying. The value of houses plummeted, some by more than 50 per cent, leaving many people owing big mortgages worth more than the property involved. Banks found themselves weighed down with mortgage defaults and toxic assets worth a fraction of their previous value. The countryside is dotted with ghost towns, huge housing developments that remain unfinished and unsold. Federal and regional governments that had spent big as revenues flowed found themselves unable to balance budgets.
The human cost is dire. Spain now has 1.7 million households in which no one is working, and the government says it does not expect joblessness to fall below 22 per cent until at least 2015.
For Valiente and others like her, this means adult life is on hold indefinitely. She and her boyfriend would like to live together but they can’t afford it, she says in frustration: “You can’t leave home. You can’t be in a couple. You can’t be a mother. You feel like you are too old for everything, but at the same time, you have to live like you’re a 15-year-old. You live with your parents; you live like a teenager.”
This pattern of delayed adult milestones is also showing up in statistics, says sociologist Almudena Moreno Minguez of Valladolid University. “If you compare us with other European countries, Spaniards are now marrying three or four years later, on average, and having children six or seven years later.”
This is partly because many of those aged between 25 and 34 who moved out of home a few years ago when they started work are returning because they’re unemployed and broke. Parents call them “boomerangs”, she says.
“The parents aren’t happy. There comes a point when even the family cannot support another three or four members at home.”
She says research shows that young people are feeling angry and alienated from the formal structures of society; they feel they have no voice in the deciding of public affairs. Recent improvements to welfare benefits did not include them, she says, and Spain spends less of its GDP on training and education than the rest of the eurozone.
Many Spaniards talk with disdain of the “botellones” (from the word for big bottles) — young people who gather at night in public places to drink and party because they can’t afford clubs or bars.
Moreno says, “Even worse than not investing in them, people here try to make them feel guilty. ‘You are responsible for this situation.’ It’s like they have spat them out.”
A survey of young people aged 15 to 29 asked them to rank different institutions according to how well they respected them. Moreno says, “They gave justice 3, unions 4.5 — and politicians 2.”
Their disdain for politicians is shared by their elders. Newspaper columnist Luis del Pino, who contributes to El Mundo, says Spaniards have an old saying, “Two things are bad for your health — politicians and smoking, in that order.”
He says “legal” political corruption is to blame for many of the financial problems. Regional politicians manipulated local banks to encourage finance for local projects: “They put boards of directors that oriented these savings banks towards giving credit to big construction companies who were friends of the politicians. All this subsequently collapsed.”
Four Spanish banks that have been part-nationalised because of toxic debts have at least €71 billion ($A87 billion) in bad loans on their books.
Politicians also made many political appointments to get friends and supporters on the public payroll, he says. “Mayors and ministers have a total of 17,000 ‘personal advisers’, according to my colleagues at El Mundo. That’s an €850 million expense each year.”
And some politicians also manipulated the “brick bubble” for personal profit, buying land they knew was to be rezoned and reselling it for many times the original value, he says.
But Spain also has tight labour laws that need reform. Both right-wing and left-wing economists agree regulations, generous but not all unreasonable in boom times, now serve to lock young people out of work.
Sick employees can get most or all of their wages for 18 months. Employees can only be sacked without a payout in the first year, and many long-serving staff would cost €80,000 or more to let go. Businesses stay small because once they reach 50 employees, they must have five workplace reps to bargain on wages and conditions, each of whom receive 15 paid hours a month for these duties. Companies also pay higher rates of tax once they have more than 25 staff.
Inigo del Toro Calonje lost his job as an environmental engineer with a company designing golf courses when the boom bust. Golf courses had sprung up to add value to housing developments in the middle of nowhere but suddenly his company’s clients stopped paying and Calonje, unable to find another job, decided to set up his own consultancy.
It cost him €4000 and took three months to set it up to comply with government regulations. He earns only 60 per cent of what he earned as an employee but must pay company taxes each month and is driven mad by the different environmental regulations in Spain’s 17 regions. “They punish us for trying to be independent,” he says.
He is not the only one feeling punished by “la crisis”. “Social instability is a risk because we will have a large group of young unemployed for a long, long time,” warns Almudena Moreno (pictured). “It will produce social conflict and the social structure will break down because young people don’t see any future; they don’t see any solution. What is going to happen in three or four years if we don’t find a solution?
“Here, democracy is quite young. It’s less than 40 years [since dictator General Franco died], it’s nothing. Our structures are quite weak. It’s hard to predict but if groups such as the long-term unemployed, the young people with no future and the people who have been evicted join together, their social power could be terrible, and dangerous too.”
Luis del Pino is another who can foresee potential trouble. He warns of the “amazing speed” with which the middle class, the backbone of any developed society, is disappearing.
“It would be a disaster if this led to the rise of political extremism. Franco is within living memory here. When you put several million people in a desperate enough situation, then they will hear anyone who promises them some hope, even if that anyone is the most despicable man.”
Right now, those questions are too big for most of the young jobless, for whom the main question is where to go next. Many are considering joining the tens of thousands leaving the country to seek fortune in foreign lands.
Enrique Melendez, 30, who lost his job writing for a public relations firm, is thinking about migrating to South America. It’s far away but they speak Spanish there, he says.
He is grateful to have worked at all: “At least the people around 30 had a job and lost it. At least we have had the experience of work. It’s more dangerous for the next ones coming behind us, who’ve never had a job and have no experience.”
Eva Valiente is wondering about moving too. She has two ideas; to become a cook and move to a rural town — “life is cheaper there” — or to go to England and improve her English and, therefore, her saleability. Maybe both. She cannot see anything changing for her in Madrid any time soon: “They say the crisis will go on for five or 10 years. I don’t know. Young people are very sad.”
HARD FIGURES
■ The number of people helped by Spanish Catholic charity Caritas
2007: 400,000
2011: 1 million, mostly families with children
■ Unemployment
2005: 8.7%
2012: 25%
■ On the edge of poverty
10.5 million people, 22% of the population
■ Court orders for evictions
2007: 25,943
2010: 93,636
■ Homes in which no one works
2005: 2.6%
2012: 9.1%
SOURCE: CARITAS SPAIN

First published in The Age.

The pain in Spain falls on ghost towns

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Half-vacant Sesena is symptomatic of the economic blight in Spain. Karen Kissane reports from Madrid.

THE blunt brown apartment blocks of Sesena rise into the sky and spread wide along the dry paddocks. Around them, dirt from bare ground whirls in the summer wind, crane towers lie piled like matchsticks, and cyclone fencing surrounds the dream that turned to dust.
Block after block of apartments stand shuttered and empty, monuments to the folly and greed of Spain’s “brick bubble” — the property boom that went bust in 2007. Five years later, only 5000 of the 13,000 homes planned for Sesena are completed, and 2000 of those have yet to be sold.
This is the Spanish paradox: as huge property developments all over the country fade into ghost towns, an average of 159 people a day are being evicted because they can no longer pay their mortgages.
Foreclosures have quadrupled, with the courts granting 530,000 eviction orders between 2008 and 2011. Homelessness has increased as an estimated one in five houses — up to 5.6 million homes — stand empty.
An action group, Stop Evictions, has profiled the typical evictees: Spanish-born, with children in their care, and unemployed. The Spanish jobless rate is now the highest in Europe, 23 per cent, and its youth unemployment is a staggering 53 per cent, the worst in the industrial world. This means many people cannot afford to buy a home even though some houses and flats are now one-third the price they were five years ago in the heady days of cheap credit.
A young mother pushing a pram in the otherwise empty streets of Sesena, half an hour’s drive south of Madrid, says she and those in her block have been lucky; they paid only €72,000 ($A87,000) for their fire-sale apartments.
She would like the landscaping to be finished — “This should be garden,” she says, gesturing at the dirt — but her neighbours in the block opposite have a more serious problem: “They are worried and angry; they paid €200,000, big money.”
The property crash has been devastating to Spaniards who, unlike most Europeans, are as obsessed with home ownership as Australians. Retirees have lost their savings, young couples are stuck with big mortgages on houses they cannot sell, and Spanish banks are overloaded with toxic debt.
This week the government of Catalonia, with a budget as big as Portugal’s, became the second region to ask the Spanish government for a financial bailout. It wants an emergency credit line of €5 billion to help fund payments on its €42 billion debt.
In another barometer of rising fear, private depositors in Spanish banks withdrew more money in August than at any time since the country joined the euro.
Meanwhile Sesena has no chemist, its only public transport is a bus to Madrid once an hour, and the ground floors of all its blocks stand shuttered and blank — the retail businesses that were meant to fill them have never eventuated.
A young jogger living in blocks of nearby townhouses — who, like the mother, did not wish to give his name — says he regrets having bought a home in Sesena: “It’s too quiet. If we want to go out and do things, we have to go to Madrid.”
Then, realising he has just talked down his own property value, he bids a quick farewell and jogs off down a weed-filled street of withered front gardens.

First published in The Age.

Breivik found sane, faces life imprisonment

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THE Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has been found responsible for his crimes and faces life in prison.

THE Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has been found responsible for his crimes and faces life in prison.

A panel of five judges led by Judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, who read the judgment, declared their verdict to be unanimous.

Breivik smiled briefly when he heard the verdict of guilt over terrorism offences and premeditated murder. Earlier he had made a straight-armed fascist salute in court.

The judges effectively found that Breivik was sane when he slaughtered 77 people last year and sentenced him to ”preventive detention”. This is different to a normal prison sentence, which carries a maximum of 21 years.

Breivik will be assessed after 21 years and his sentence could be extended if he is considered to still be a threat to society.

Consignment to a psychiatric ward would have no time limit.

Breivik, who had fought against a finding of insanity because he did not want to be dismissed as a madman, had said psychiatric care would be ”worse than death”.

Breivik was charged with terrorism offences after twin attacks on July 22 last year. He set off a 950-kilogram car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight people, then took a boat to Utoeya Island where he strode around dressed in police uniform and shot 69 people, most of them teenagers, who were attending a summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s Labour Party. He injured 242 people.

Breivik, 33, claimed he was fighting the ”Islamicisation” of Norway and Europe and called on others to join his crusade against left-wing multiculturalists and the immigration of Muslims.

The question for the court had not been whether Breivik committed the atrocities – he admitted his actions – but whether he was mad or bad, which would determine whether he should be hospitalised or jailed.

Psychiatrists had been divided over his mental state. The first court-appointed panel found him to be a paranoid schizophrenic but a second, while diagnosing several disorders, declared he would not have been psychotic when he committed the attacks.

The prosecution had called for him to be sent to a psychiatric hospital. Breivik himself said he was sane and demanded jail, to enhance what he saw as his status as a national hero, a right-wing cultural warrior defending his people against invasion.

The victims’ families had wanted him to be found sane so he could be held responsible for what they saw as a political crime. Seventy per cent of Norwegians polled shared this view.

After the verdict a survivor, Eivind Rindal, told a Norwegian newspaper: ”The most important thing is that he never gets out. There are many who share his extreme views in our society.”

A bereaved relative said: ”Now he will be locked up for life and we can forget about him.”

The court’s decision means there will be no appeal. One of his lawyers, Geir Lippestad, had promised that his client would not contest a jail sentence.

The gunman is expected to live a regimented life at the high-security Ila prison near Oslo.

Breivik has spent his time in detention writing his memoirs, according to another of his lawyers, Tord Jordet. He plans to finish the book in the first half of next year and has received unconfirmed offers from publishers in southern Europe, Mr Jordet said.

The killings shone a spotlight on far-right extremism and tensions over multiculturalism in a country that had previously been noted for its peacefulness.

There is a growing consensus in Norway that the feeling of national unity, symbolised by the huge ”rose marches” in which hundreds of thousands marched in defiance during the aftermath of the attacks, has slowly ebbed away as the country becomes divided over the issues of rising immigration and cultural integration.

Thorbjoern Jagland, a former prime minister and the chairman of the Nobel peace prize committee, believes Norway learnt nothing from the tragedy: ”People at the political level have been more cautious regarding the debate around integration and Muslims, but if you look at what is going on at the grassroots level it has not changed.”

Kari Helene Partapuoli, of Oslo’s anti-racist centre, said the government had not started programs to improve cultural awareness.

First published in The Age.

NEWSMAKER: PRINCE HARRY

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The makeover of the wild man of Windsor has hit a bump in the road, writes Karen Kissane in London.

First prize must go to the British newspaper The Sun for the earthy brilliance of its headline about a naked Prince Harry covering his genitals with his hands: “Harry grabs the crown jewels.”
But the left-wing paper The Guardian wins the silver. Referring to the small red star that draws attention to the central point of the royal rear in another photograph, columnist Hadley Freeman muses that she is not sure “if the red star on the royal bare backside is a coy editorial choice … or that’s just how royal arses come”.
This week, everyone’s wild about Harry – except, perhaps, his nanna, who must have choked on her breakfast toast at the news that the third in line to the throne had been photographed in a Las Vegas hotel room playing naked with girls and that the pictures had swept right across the world via the internet.
Suddenly, the Queen has been sucked back into the kind of ghastly maelstrom last visited upon her when Fergie was photographed having her toes kissed beside a pool. Or, worse, the brouhaha when Charles was taped talking about how he longed to be his mistress’s tampon.
A suddenly circumspect Harry is lying low. His Dad has unleashed his hounds on the British press. Several reportedly paid tens of thousands of pounds to buy the images but Prince Charles’s lawyers, Harbottle and Lewis, sent a letter to Leveson-cowed newspapers via the Press Complaints Commission warning that under the editors’ code of practice, “It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent.”
That did not stop some British editors from publishing links to the celebrity-gossip site tmz.com, which originally published the images, and yesterday the Sun splashed one of the pictures over its front page.
It is thought one of the girls had taken the images on a camera phone and later sold them for up to ¬£200,000 ($303,000). They show the birthday-suited prince getting up close and personal with a naked woman while playing a game of “strip billiards”.
Almost as entertaining are the legitimate photographs taken of Harry the next morning, after news of the pictures broke. He might be 27 but his facial expressions would be recognised by any parent of an errant teenager: sheepishness and dread.
Harry had pretty much recovered from his image-denting attendance at a party while wearing a swastika armband in 2005. On an official trip to the Caribbean earlier this year, he charmed leaders and paraded his blue suede shoes.
Harry’s makeover was said to be partly the work of a new team of spin doctors who are refashioning the monarchy’s image for a modern age. But Harry, bless him, will long remain the spin doctors’ greatest challenge.
Life and times
Prince Harry is an Apache helicopter pilot who has served in Afghanistan and is expected to return later this year.
At 12, walked behind the coffin at the funeral of his mother, Princess Diana.
Reportedly had engaged in underage drinking; has admitted smoking marijuana.
In 2005, was photographed wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party and later apologised.
In 2009, made a derogatory remark about a Pakistani soldier. Sent to army sensitivity training.First published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

MP’s defence of Assange triggers consensual sex row

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LONDON

As American politicians race to distance themselves from the notion of “legitimate rape”, a British MP has triggered his own furore by saying that having sex with a woman while she is asleep is not rape.
Controversial independent MP George Galloway has been attacked in all of Britain’s leading newspapers after he claimed a rape allegation in relation to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had no basis. “Not everybody has to be asked prior to each insertion,” he said.
Speaking of the allegations by two Swedish women of sexual misconduct by Mr Assange, Mr Galloway said: “Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape.
“At least, not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this. Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him, claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know.”
Telegraph columnist Tom Chivers wrote in response to Mr Galloway: “She was unconscious at the time. It was literally impossible for her to consent. Having sex with someone once does not give them carte blanche to have sex with you again; the woman is entitled to change her mind between ‘insertions’ (Yuck, George. Yuck.)
“And what is more, she is entitled to expect the man to wait until she is sufficiently conscious to state whether or not she has changed her mind. That is what ‘consent’ involves. Giving it once is not a waiver of one’s right to refuse it in future.”
Sarah Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, told the Guardian Mr Galloway’s comments supported an enduring false notion of “real” or “serious” rape. “It can be just as devastating to be raped asleep by someone you know, as it is to be raped by a stranger,” she said.
Mr Galloway is no stranger to controversy. A former Labour MP, he was expelled from the party in 2003 as a result of his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. In 2004, he co-founded the left-wing coalition Respect, an acronym for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community and Trade Unionism, and returned to Parliament in 2005.
He made his controversial comments in his weekly video podcast, “Good night with George Galloway”. While he described Mr Assange’s alleged behaviour as “sordid”, he said: “I don’t believe either of these women.” He said while “it might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Do you mind if I do it again?’ – it might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette – but whatever else it is, it is not rape, or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.”
Mr Assange’s supporters believe the women were a “honey trap” after he angered US authorities with the publication of thousands of secret diplomatic cables. Mr Assange denies the women’s claims and has not been charged.First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

End witch-hunt and let us go free, Assange tells US

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LONDON

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has demanded that the US cease its attack on him and his colleagues, calling on the President, Barack Obama, to “renounce its witch-hunt” and “do the right thing”.
In a passionate speech late last night from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been holed up since June 19, Mr Assange called on the US to immediately “dissolve its FBI investigation”, declaring: “As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does our freedom of expression.”
“The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.”
Mr Assange attacked the US for forcing Bradley Manning, the former US soldier accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, to “endure months in of tortuous detention”.
“He must be released,” he said.
In the 10-minute address, the flush-faced 41-year-old thanked the government of Ecuador for its offer of asylum and the governments of other South American nations for their support.
He apologised to his loved ones. “To my family and my children, who have been without their father, forgive me. We will be reunited soon,” he said.
Following a European arrest warrant issued for Assange in relation to allegations in Sweden of rape and sexual assault, and a failed appeal in Britain against extradition to Sweden, Mr Assange broke his bail conditions on June 19 to enter the embassy,requesting political asylum on the grounds that he was being persecuted. Britain declared that Mr Assange faced arrest should he step onto the embassy’s front steps.
Hundreds of supporters waited for hours in drizzling rain for the balcony address. Before Mr Assange appeared, the writer Tariq Ali and others read messages of support from film director Ken Loach, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Australian journalist John Pilger. His supporters were joined by scores of police, including a ring of officers surrounding the low balcony.
Earlier, his legal adviser, Baltasar Garzon, said Mr Assange had “instructed his lawyers to carry out legal action” protecting “the rights of WikiLeaks [and] Julian himself”.
Mr Garzon did not give specific details of the action but said it would extend to “all those currently being investigated”.
A spokesman for Wikileaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told the media Mr Assange might give himself up to Sweden, if Sweden promised it would not extradite him to the US.
It is claimed he could face political persecution or even the death penalty if charged in the US over the publication of confidential diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website.
It was revealed yesterday that the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, over-rode the advice of his own lawyers when Britain sent a letter to the Ecuadorean government in which the Foreign Office effectively warned it had the power to enter the embassy to arrest Mr Assange.First published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Assange looks to international court

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LONDON

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange will appeal to the International Court of Justice if Britain prevents him from going to Ecuador, according to a senior Spanish human rights lawyer.WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange will appeal to the International Court of Justice if Britain prevents him from going to Ecuador, according to a senior Spanish human rights lawyer.

Baltasar Garzon, who is working on Assange’s defence, told Spanish newspaper El Pais that Britain was legally required to allow Assange to leave once he had diplomatic asylum.

“What the United Kingdom must do is apply the diplomatic obligations of the refugee convention and let him leave, giving him safe conduct,” he said. “Otherwise, he will go to the International Court of Justice.”

Ecuador announced on Thursday that it was offering Assange asylum because it believed he would face persecution and a possible death penalty in the United States, where authorities are furious over the release of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables on his website.

Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for two months trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sexual offences claims by two women. He denies the allegations.

His supporters fear that if he went to Sweden, he could from there be extradited to the US.

Mr Garzon said the attempted extradition to Sweden was a ploy to allow the US to exact “political revenge” on Assange.

Mr Garzon, best known for trying to extradite former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet from London to Madrid on human rights charges in 1998, criticised Britain’s threat to arrest Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy, saying this was a threat of “invasion”.

The former judge, who was barred from the judiciary in Spain in February for exceeding his authority in probing a corruption case, held a long conversation with Assange, 41, on Wednesday evening, the paper said. “He was very confident that they would give him asylum, as they did,” Mr Garzon was quoted as saying. “He seemed very calm and in good spirits. He knows he is in the right.”

British Foreign Secretary William Hague told London’s Times newspaper that he had not expected Ecuador to make public a letter he had sent in which he warned he had the power to strip the embassy of its diplomatic status in order to allow police to enter. He later told reporters: “There is no threat here to storm an embassy.”

Assange’s quarters come with an air mattress laid on an office floor, and a window from which he can gaze in the direction of London’s distant airports, and the possibility they represent of a flight to Ecuador.

For now, that flight might as well be a million kilometres away, given the 20 or 30 Scotland Yard officers keeping a 24-hour watch outside the embassy. Friends who have visited Assange say he has a computer and a broadband connection, at least one mobile phone, and regular deliveries of takeaway food, carefully inspected by the police.

While the British laws governing consular premises do allow for the de-recognition of an embassy, any such move would also have to comply with international law.

Mr Hague said it was a matter of regret that Ecuador had decided to grant asylum and Britain would not permit Assange safe passage out of the country. He said the case could go on for a considerable time.

WikiLeaks said on Twitter that Assange would give a live statement “in front of the Ecuadorean embassy” tomorrow at 2pm, London time. It is not clear what “in front of the embassy” means. The embassy is an apartment inside a much larger building, and an announcement at the apartment’s front door would still be inside the building.

He could be seized if it is deemed he has stepped outside the embassy’s diplomatically protected area.

The lawyer for the two Swedish women, Claes Borgstrom, said Ecuador’s move was absurd and an abuse of asylum law, which was designed to protect people from persecution and torture if sent back to their country of origin.

“He doesn’t risk being handed over to the United States for torture or the death penalty. He should be brought to justice in Sweden,” Mr Borgstrom said.

The Union of South American Nations will meet tomorrow to discuss the situation at the embassy.

First published on theage.com.au

Girl’s body found at grandmother’s house

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LONDON

HER name and face have been on Britain’s television screens for a week as her family begged for help in finding missing schoolgirl Tia Sharp, 12.
Now the partner of the girl’s grandmother has been charged with killing her after her body was found in her grandmother’s house on a council estate in Croydon, south London.
Stuart Hazell, 37, was found hiding under a log on a common and will appear in court today.
Tia’s grandmother, Christine Sharp, 46, was also arrested on suspicion of murder and her neighbour, Paul Meehan, 39, was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender. They have both been released on bail.
Meanwhile, Scotland Yard, which apparently botched the investigation by failing to find Tia’s body sooner despite three searches of her grandmother’s house, has apologised to Tia’s mother for the delays.
A spokesman said the searches included one that was meant to have been a full one last Sunday week, and an inspection by a sniffer dog on Wednesday, and that they should have been more thorough.
“We have apologised to Tia’s mother that our procedures did not lead to the discovery of the body on this search,” the spokesman said. He added that there would be a review of processes “to ensure such a failing is not repeated”.
The body was not found until Friday, when police decided a more intensive fourth sweep of the house was necessary.
Police now want to establish how long the body had been there.
Hazell had said he was the last person to see Tia before she was reported missing on Friday, August 3, which led to a hunt involving nearly 100 officers, who scoured woodland near the house and examined 800 hours of CCTV footage.
Tia was in Hazell’s care when she went missing and he told police she had left the house to buy a pair of thongs and had little money and no transport card or mobile phone.
Hazell had previously dated Tia’s mother, Natalie Sharp, 30.
Before his arrest, he told a television interviewer: “Did I do anything to Tia? No I bloody didn’t. I’d never think of that. I loved her to bits, she’s like my own daughter. She’s got a lovely home. I can’t work out what’s going on.
“She’s a happy-go-lucky golden angel, she’s perfect . . . Just come home, babe, come and eat your dinner.”
Hazell said people were “pointing the finger” at him because he had been the last person to see her but that a neighbour told police he saw Tia leave the house alone and had even been able to describe “the pattern on her top”.
Her grandmother had earlier told reporters: “My only message to Tia is that I love her. She is my life.”First published in The Age.

Fragile UK coalition heading for showdown

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LONDON

BRITISH Prime Minister David Cameron’s electoral reform plans are in tatters and his uncomfortable coalition with the Liberal Democrats further strained by his inability to persuade 91 of his Conservative MPs to back an elected House of Lords.
The failure also embarrasses Lib Dems leader and deputy PM Nick Clegg, who had promised his party would use its position in the coalition of uneasy bedfellows to win political reform.
Mr Clegg had wanted the Lords to become an elected house. With this goal now thwarted, he has announced that his MPs will vote against the Prime Minister’s goal of revising parliamentary boundaries to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600.
The redrawing was expected to result in the abolition of up to 40 Labour and Lib Dem seats, boosting Mr Cameron’s chances of re-election in 2015 by giving him up to another 20 seats.
Labour had fiercely fought the proposals because it feared they could give the Conservatives power for a generation.
Mr Clegg said the Conservatives had breached the coalition agreement by trying to “pick and choose” which parts to back. “My party has held to that contract even when it meant voting for things that we found difficult,” he said.
“But the Conservative Party is not honouring the commitment to Lords reform and, as a result, part of our contract has now been broken. Clearly I cannot permit a situation where Conservative rebels can pick and choose the parts of the contract they like, while Liberal Democrat MPs are bound by the entire agreement. So I have told the Prime Minister that when . . . Parliament votes on boundary changes for the 2015 election, I will be instructing my party to oppose them.”
Conservatives retorted that Mr Clegg was failing to stand by his own principles. Conservative MP Eleanor Laing said: “He said [boundary changes] will make politics fairer. Now he says, ‘no, we’re not going to do this because making politics fairer is now not a good idea’. It is rather inconsistent, to put it politely.”
Mr Clegg had earlier argued that the plans to equalise the size of electoral constituencies would correct “fundamental injustices in how people elect their MPs”.
Conservative Chancellor George Osborne said abandoning the push for electoral reform would free the government to “focus 110 per cent on the economy, which is what the public wants”.
It is the third major policy defeat for Lib Dems trying to justify their decision to enter the coalition, following the disastrous failure of a referendum on voting reform and the introduction of steep university fees.
But psephologist Lewis Baston said, “Some Liberal Democrat MPs will be breathing a secret sigh of relief. They have dodged a bullet. The Lib Dems suffer worst proportionately from the changes because their seats tend, on average, to have smaller majorities and to be surrounded by areas where the Lib Dems did not poll many votes in 2010.”First published in The Age.