‘Looks very awful and ill’: Journalist tells RT he ‘couldn’t recognize’ Assange during High Court hearing on his extradition to US — RT World News

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‘Looks very awful and ill’: Journalist tells RT he ‘couldn’t recognize’ Assange during High Court hearing on his extradition to US — RT World News

Excerpt:

Journalist Richard Medhurst claims that he initially didn’t recognize Julian Assange, who looked “awful and ill,” as the WikiLeaks founder appeared in London’s High Court while the United States pushes to have him extradited.

Medhurst told RT said that he “literally did a double take” upon seeing Assange during the High Court preliminary hearing on Wednesday, which he was connected to remotely.

“I couldn’t recognize that it was Assange, he looked extremely old,” Medhurst declared, adding that the WikiLeaks founder looked so “awful and ill” that it took him a “minute” to realize it was Assange as medical witnesses testified that his “health has deteriorated and he’s been tortured” while in detention.

Assange’s voice also “did not sound very well,” according to Medhurst, who noted that “this is absolutely normal given the fact that he’s locked up in solitary confinement” and has been in “arbitrary detention now for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, two years in Belmarsh Prison.”

“This is a journalist who’s not serving a sentence, he’s not a criminal, and he’s in a maximum-security prison in Britain’s Guantanamo Bay,” Medhurst protested, calling Assange’s imprisonment “completely unjust,” “a crime against press freedoms,” and “an affront against his personal health.”