VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT NICOLAS Maduro offered asylum to US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden late Friday, giving a possible escape route to the fugitive whose revelations rocked the US government and security establishment.
In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega also gave the 30-year-old computer expert another glimmer of hope, saying that “if circumstances permit”, his government would be willing to shelter the man who has been in limbo in a Moscow airport since June 23.
How Snowden, whose passport has been revoked, could travel to either country remains unclear.
Snowden has been scrambling to evade espionage charges after disclosing a vast US electronic surveillance program to collect phone and internet data.
WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website aiding Snowden, revealed on Tuesday a list of 21 nations where he applied for asylum, including Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ireland.
On Friday it said he was seeking shelter in six more countries, writing on Twitter the countries “will not be named at this time due to attempted US interference.”
Several European countries, along with India and Brazil, have already turned down the requests, but leftist Latin American leaders have voiced sympathy for the bespectacled fugitive.
“As head of state of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela, I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young Snowden … to protect this young man from the persecution launched by the most powerful empire in the world,” Maduro said at an independence day event.
“I announced to the friendly governments of the world that we have decided to offer this international human right to protect this young man,” said Maduro, who had previously suggested he would consider offering Snowden asylum.
Ortega, also at a public event, said his government had received an asylum application at its embassy in Moscow.
“We are open, respectful of the right to asylum, and it is clear that, if circumstances permit it, we would receive Snowden with pleasure and give him asylum here in Nicaragua,” the leftist leader said.
Ecuador had been seen as the American’s best hope when he arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport from Hong Kong, but the leftist government in Quito has yet to consider his application.
Maduro said Tuesday in Moscow, where he was on an official visit, that his government had not yet received an asylum request.
Snowden’s flight from justice has embarrassed the administration of US President Barack Obama and created tensions between European and Latin American nations after an incident involving the Bolivian president’s airplane.
Bolivia accused France, Portugal, Italy and Spain of denying Morales flyover rights because they believed Snowden was aboard as he returned home from Russia late Tuesday.
The Bolivian leader, who suggested that Washington pressured the Europeans to close their airspace to him, threatened to shut the US embassy.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo said his government was told that Snowden was aboard Morales’ flight, but he denied that Madrid had refused overfly rights to the Bolivian president’s aircraft and did not identify who provided the apparently faulty intelligence.
France apologized for temporarily refusing entry to Morales’s jet, with President Francois Hollande saying there was “conflicting information” about the passengers.
- AFP, 2013
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