Syria live updates: US embassy says situation ‘volatile,’ urges citizens to leave

(LONDON) — Julian Assange made his first public appearance since his release from prison, telling European lawmakers the United States had forced him to “plead guilty to journalism” to put an end to his years of captivity and that his case still set a dangerous precedent.

Assange addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an international rights body, in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday.

He said he had eventually chosen “freedom over unrealizable justice” in agreeing to the deal that allowed him to walk free after 14 years spent in detention.

“I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism,” Assange said at the hearing, which was broadcast live.

Assange was released from Britain’s Belmarsh prison in June and flown to a U.S.-district court on the Pacific island of Saipan after accepting the deal. There he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. documents and a judge sentenced him to 62 weeks in prison, the equivalent to his time spent in Belmarsh. The U.S. had been seeking to prosecute Assange on 18 counts under the Espionage Act.

The agreement ended the more than decade-long effort by the U.S. to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing thousands of classified materials, including diplomatic cables and some materials showing possible war crimes by American troops.

“I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else,” Assange said.

Assange was imprisoned in Belmarsh for five years while fighting extradition to the U.S. Prior to that, he spent seven years confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, facing arrest if he went outside.

“The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey,” Assange said on Tuesday. “It strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence. I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured.”

Since his release, Assange has been living with his wife Stella and their two young sons in his native Australia.

“I think everyone can tell that he is exhausted, that he is still very much in the process of recovering,” Stella Assange told reporters at the hearing. “And at the moment, the only concrete plan in the foreseeable future is that he will continue his recovery.”

Assange and his supporters have warned that the plea deal still sets a dangerous precedent for media freedom, making him the first journalist to be convicted under the Espionage Act. At the hearing, Assange said he was precluded from seeking justice over his detention, saying the U.S. had required the plea agreement to include a prohibition on his filing cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

He and his team are campaigning for a U.S. presidential pardon.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, who also attended Tuesday’s hearing, addressed the precedent of Assange’s pardon with ABC News.

“You need to take away that dagger. It has now been bloodied once. And if there is no reaction and no push and no political desire to take that weapon out of any politician’s hand, it will be used again,” said Hrafnsson.

Asked if Assange had plans for work with WikiLeaks now that he was free, Hrafnsson said he had nothing to disclose for now.

“I’m certain there will be a role,” Hrafnsson said. “And of course there is a role for Julian. And of course there’s a role for the recognition of the work and the past and the legacy of Julian Assange’s and how he contributed in this massive manner to the history of journalism in this century.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(LONDON) — An initial investigation into possible sabotage has been launched by four NATO countries — Finland, Germany, Sweden and Lithuania — after two underwater telecommunications cables connecting Germany and Finland across the Baltic Sea were cut in two separate incidents in recent days, a European official told ABC News.

Sweden is leading the investigation, as both incidents occurred in the Swedish economic zone, a Swedish Ministry of Defense official told ABC News.

“Against the backdrop of the security situation, the government is following developments very closely and is in close contact with its authorities. It is central that greater clarity is brought to the cause of this event,” Swedish Minister for Civil Defense Carl-Oskar Bohlin told ABC News in a written statement.

The German-Finnish cable was one of two Baltic Sea connections damaged in recent days.

An underwater cable that runs between Lithuania and Sweden in the Baltic Sea was cut on Sunday around 10 a.m. local time, Telia spokesperson Audrius Stasiulaitis told ABC News. Telia is a Lithuanian telecommunications company. A cable that runs between Germany and Finland was cut on Monday around 3 p.m. local time.

“Our monitoring systems could tell there was a cut due to the traffic disruption and that the cause was not the equipment failure but physical damage to the fiber cable itself,” Stasiulaitis said.

Internet traffic was not impacted, as the company rerouted the traffic after the disruption occurred, Stasiulaitis said.

The underwater cable has been in place since 1997, Arelion spokesperson Martin Sjogren told ABC News. Arelion is a Swedish telecommunications company that operates and owns the cable.

Arelion is in touch with Swedish authorities about the incident, Sjogren said.

A repair ship will need to get on-site in order to determine the cause of the break, Sjogren said. Repair work is scheduled to start later this week and could be finished by late next week depending on the weather, Sjogren added.

The Lithuanian Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter, a statement from their office said Tuesday. Swedish police have also opened a preliminary investigation into the matter, a statement from Swedish police said Tuesday.

The foreign ministries of Germany and Finland said in a joint statement on Monday they were “deeply concerned” by the severing of an undersea cable connecting the two countries across the Baltic Sea — one of two Baltic Sea connections suddenly damaged in recent days.

Finnish company Cinia reported a “fault situation” with its C-Lion-1 submarine cable on Monday afternoon, saying in a statement that an investigation and repair work were underway.

Cinia did not offer any explanation for the interruption to the connection and said undersea cable repairs generally take between five and 15 days. The 730-mile cable has connected Finland to central European communication networks since 2016.

The German Interior Ministry confirmed to ABC News that authorities believe the cable was severed by an external force near the Swedish island of Oland.

Berlin and Helsinki said they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable.”

“The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” the joint foreign ministries’ statement continued.

“A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”

The damage to the C-Lion-1 cable came one day after Telia Lietuva — a Swedish telecoms company in Lithuania — said one of its undersea telecommunications cables linking Lithuania and Sweden across the Baltic Sea sustained damage.

That cable — which intersects with the C-Lion-1 Finnish-German cable — was damaged on Sunday morning, company spokesperson Andrius Semeskevicius told local media.

The damaged cable has been the subject of faults and accidents in the past. But, Semeskevicius told Lithuanian National Radio and Television, “since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors, but something more serious could be going on.”

The cause of the damage to the cables has yet to be established. The interruptions come against a backdrop of concerns over Russian sabotage operations in Europe and elsewhere, prompted by Western support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Moscow.

The Baltic Sea has been the scene of mysterious undersea incidents in recent years, such as the sabotage attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany in 2022.

The following year, a Chinese container ship — the Newnew Polar Bear — dragged its anchor for more than 100 nautical miles through the Gulf of Finland, damaging an undersea natural gas pipeline and two telecommunications cables. Finnish and Estonian authorities are conducting a joint criminal investigation into the incident.

ABC News’ Aicha El Hammar and Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(LONDON) — A senior Russian general was killed in a bomb blast in a residential neighborhood in Moscow, Russian media reported early Tuesday, in what Ukrainian sources told ABC News was an intelligence operation.

Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov was killed by an explosive device that appears to have been hidden in a parked scooter and set off by remote control, Russian state-affiliated media TASS reported. The explosion also killed an aide accompanying him.

Kirillov was the head of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological protection troops. Sources told ABC News that the Security Service of Ukraine was behind the killing.

“Kirillov was a war criminal and an entirely legitimate target, as he issued orders to use prohibited chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops,” an SBU source said. “Such an inglorious end awaits all those who kill Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable” the source said.

On Monday, the SBU charged Kirillov in absentia with war crimes for alleged orders approving chemical weapon use against Ukrainian troops.

Kirillov, the SBU said on Telegram, “is responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons” on the Ukrainian front lines.

“By order of Kirillov, more than 4,800 cases of the enemy’s use of chemical munitions have been recorded since the beginning of the full-scale war,” the SBU said.

Among the delivery methods, the SBU said, were grenades equipped with toxic substances like CS and CN irritants.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.