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London:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange complained of listening to imaginary voices and music whereas detained in a high-security British jail, a psychiatrist who has interviewed him instructed his extradition listening to on Tuesday.
Michael Kopelman, a psychiatrist who has interviewed Assange round 20 occasions, mentioned the previous hacker could be a “very high” suicide danger if he had been extradited to the United States for leaking army secrets and techniques.
He cited as proof Assange’s “severe depression” and “psychotic symptoms”, which included auditory hallucinations whereas in solitary confinement in his cell on the high-security Belmarsh Prison in southwest London.
Kopelman instructed the Old Bailey court docket in central London that Assange mentioned he hallucinated music and voices saying “you are dust, you are dead, we are coming to get you”.
Assange’s suicidal impulses “arise out of clinical factors… but it is the imminence of extradition that will trigger the attempt,” he added, warning “he will deteriorate substantially” if extradited.
Assange’s accomplice Stella Moris has beforehand mentioned she feared he would take his personal life, leaving their two younger sons with no father.
James Lewis, representing the US authorities, quizzed Kopelman over the veracity of a few of Assange’s claims, suggesting he might have made them up.
Assange faces 18 fees below the US Espionage Act referring to the 2010 launch by WikiLeaks of 500,000 secret recordsdata detailing facets of US army campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Washington claims he helped intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to steal the paperwork earlier than exposing confidential sources all over the world.
If convicted, Assange — who has been held at Belmarsh for the final 16 months — might be jailed for as much as 175 years.
US authorities lately laid out new proof, alleging that Assange and others on the whistleblowing web site recruited hackers.
The extradition listening to is the newest in a collection of authorized battles confronted by Assange for the reason that leaks a decade in the past.
In 2010, he confronted allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden, which he denied.
He was in Britain on the time however dodged an try and extradite him to Sweden by claiming political asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London.
For seven years he lived in a small condo within the embassy, however after a change of presidency in Ecuador, Quito misplaced endurance with its visitor and turned him over to British police in April 2019.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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