UK Prosecutors Admit Destroying Emails Related to Assange's Case - Reports

An Italian newspaper will face London tribunal to argue that the press has the right to see all documents related to Assange's case.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has admitted that it deleted a number of important emails it exchanged with its Swedish colleagues on the highly publicized case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Italian La Repubblica newspaper has reported.

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The information about the deleted emails emerged through FOI requests filed by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, the reporter said in her article for La Repubblica newspaper. La Repubblica will go before a London tribunal on Monday to argue that the press has the right to see all documents related to Assange's case.

The CPS spokesperson told the Guardian newspaper that the agency was not aware of the contents of the emails that were deleted when the lawyer on the UK side of the exchange retired in 2014.

Maurizi is looking into the UK influence on the Swedish authorities' decision not to travel to London to question Assange there. Assange has been wary of traveling to Sweden over fears that he might be extradited to the United States since a great number of WikiLeaks releases have concerned the inner workings of powerful US agencies, including intelligence community and diplomatic circles.

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Assange, whose whistleblowing organization has published several high-profile leaks, has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012 over the fear of extradition to Sweden, where the authorities wanted to question him under a rape investigation. In May, Sweden decided to drop the probe, but Assange has remained in the embassy, as the UK police said they would still have to detain him if he ventured out.