WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange, who has been held in terrible conditions in Belmarsh Prison, is ‘in a dire state of health due to psychological torture’, health professionals warned yesterday in an open letter.
Assange has been held in solitary confinement in the high security HMP Belmarsh since April 2019, awaiting the outcome of an extradition request by the US where he faces 18 charges, including conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer.
Penned by Doctors for Assange, the letter warns that he could be ‘effectively tortured to death in prison.’
The 117-strong group open letter published in The Lancet medical journal, calls for an end to what it describes as ‘the psychological torture and medical neglect’ of the WikiLeaks founder.
It states: ‘Assange is in a dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison, where he has been arbitrarily detained according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
‘Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN special rapporteur on torture has warned, he will have effectively been tortured to death.
‘The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds.’
WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010) which expose imperialist war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
