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Wikileaks employee claims Assange adopted 'once despised' behaviour

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ANI Sydney
Last Updated : Jun 02 2013 | 1:01 PM IST

A Wikileaks spokesperson has said that the organization's founder Julian Assange has become everything he 'originally, rightly, despised.'

Spokesperson James Ball's claims come amid investigation over sexual allegations on Assange by two women, News.com.au reports.

Ball said that Assange is not entirely venal and his problem lies in 'noble cause' corruption as he believes 'he is the good guy' despite behaviour that he might condemn in others.

Ball revealed that he quit WikiLeaks after finding that he had been deluded into handing over 90,000 US embassy cables covering Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Israel to an anti-Semitic writer Israel Shamir.

According to the report, Shamir was introduced to Bell under a false name and Assange ordered Ball to hand him over the WikiLeaks cables.

The report said that a pro-Putin outlet contacted Wikileaks to inform that Shamir had been asking for 10,000 dollars for access to the cables, which he was to sell, adding that Wikileaks was otherwise planning to sell the cables to responsible outlets for free.

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WikiLeaks also believed Shamir had given the cables to Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

Ball said that Assange refused and blocked all attempts at investigation into the Shamir case and released public statements that were false. He added that Assange allegedly tried to withdraw money from WikiLeaks' bank accounts to pay for his legal defence in the sexual assault trial, but in vain.

Ball further revealed that Assange had forced everyone at WikiLeaks to sign Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) preventing them from selling, disclosing or talking about their work or the cables they were working to release for more than a decade 'on the pain of millions of dollars of penalties.

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First Published: Jun 02 2013 | 12:58 PM IST

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