Top British, Ecuadoran diplomats to meet June 17 on Assange

Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said Monday he will meet with his British counterpart William Hague June 17 in London on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent almost a year in Quito's embassy there. "We hope that the meeting with Foreign Secretary William Hague brings us closer to seeing the case solved," Patino said in a posting on Twitter. Patino also plans to visit the Australian hacker who founded the anti-secrecy group. Assange has been holed up in Ecuador's London embassy seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning in a sexual assault case. Ecuador gave Assange diplomatic protection but London has not granted him safe conduct to leave Britain. Assange has denied any wrongdoing, and has said he fears that if he is extradited to Sweden he will be sent on to the United States, where he could face espionage charges for publishing a trove of classified documents. Patino last week said he would be presenting Assange with documents outlining why Quito has given him asylum, in effect to press London to grant him safe conduct. Assange, a harsh critic of US foreign policy, rose to fame after his website released hundreds of thousands of secret military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and classified State Department cables. Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who admitted to leaking the files to the website, faces possible life imprisonment in a military trial that began Monday. Two women accuse Assange of rape and sexual assault in 2010, when he was in Stockholm on WikiLeaks business. Assange claims the accusations are part of a smear campaign to discredit his anti-secrecy website.