Lenin Moreno, the President of Ecuador, has reportedly accused the founder of the controversial website WikiLeaks Julian Assange of leaking his family and friends highly private pictures. This accusation comes as a violation of the terms of Assange's asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been living in the Ecuador embassy since June 2012. The leaking of Moreno's private pictures is believed to be a result of the tensions going on lately between Julian Assange and the embassy of Ecuador, Gizmodo reported.

The ongoing leaking scandal

While talking to the Ecuadorean Radio Association yesterday, Moreno said he believes that the WikiLeaks founder has been involved extensively in intercepting the President's extremely private messages. Moreno also said that Assange has been leaking the images of his bedroom, what he eats during the day, his wife, his children, basically everything that comes in the definition of private, the Associated Press reported. The Ecuadorian President, however, has so far given no evidence of the hacking.

Julian Assange has been staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the city of London since he skipped bail on a sexual assault charge from Sweden dating back to the year 2012.

The legal authorities have since dropped those charges in Sweden. Even though Assange is free to leave the embassy anytime he wishes, he still proclaims himself to be a prisoner in the embassy. In several of his media interviews, Assange has said he fears that as soon as he leaves the Ecuador embassy, he will be immediately extradited to the United States where he will be prosecuted on various criminal charges filed against him over the years.

The controversial media figure has also claimed that his internet access in the embassy was suspended about a year ago. Assange believes that cutting his internet access was a part of a master plan to silence him. The embassy's officials, on the other hand, had accused Assange of intervening in the international level politics way before his access to the net was suspended.

In an official statement to the London-based news agency Reuters, Lenin Moreno, Ecuador's President has stated that Assange has come in violations of the terms of his asylum in the embassy too many times.

The President further added that If he thinks we are in any way trying to silence him, then he can talk to us because hacking someone's phone or anything else is not the solution.

In early 2018, the Ecuadorian President publicly called the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a nuisance and a problem that we inherited. The previous president of Ecuador initially granted the asylum to Julian Assange, and so far it seems that Moreno is not able to tolerate Assange's behavior in the embassy. WikiLeaks has suggested that the main reason behind Moreno's frustration towards Assange is because WikiLeaks published the INA papers which exposed the corruption scandal in Ecuador.

Moreno is currently under an investigation related to the corruption in the country which was brought forward by a rival lawmaker. The rival lawmaker claims that Moreno allegedly took money from a China-based company for a hydroelectric dam project but then laundered the borrowed money through a Panama-based shell company, the Venezuelan state media reported.

Controversies surrounding Julian Assange

In an official statement to the Associated Press, WikiLeaks has clearly stated that if the Ecuadorian president, Moreno, is willing to terminate the asylum of a refugee publisher for the sake of covering up an offshore corruption scandal, then we can assure you that history will not be kind. Assange, who is an Australian by birth was given the Ecuadorian Citizenship in January of 2018 in an attempt by the embassy to grant him diplomatic immunity.

The Ecuadorian embassy was in high hopes that this move would force Assange to permanently leave the London embassy and find asylum in some other country, but unfortunately, that too didn't work.

Not too long ago, Julian Assange said that he would be willing to leave the London embassy if the whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from prison. As a result, the previous US president Barack Obama significantly reduced Manning's jail time before leaving the Oval Office in 2017. However, then Julian Assange backed out of his promise and said that the only reason the President did this was to make Assange look like a liar. Last month, Chelsea Manning went back into the solitary confinement after she refused to answer questions related to the controversial website WikiLeaks.

Nowadays, WikiLeaks mostly talks about far-right topics and Assange himself has undoubtedly proved to be an ally for all the authoritarian-natured leaders around the world including the US president Donald Trump and the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Both WikiLeaks and Assange has many times exposed the classified secrets of the Russian government. The Twitter account of WikiLeaks even exchanged messages with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential elections. After the talks with Donald Trump Jr., it was suggested by the website WikiLeaks that Donald Trump himself should appoint Assange as the Australian ambassador to DC.