Europe

Russia: Snowden can fly anywhere he wants

Snowden
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said American whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is in the transit area at a Moscow airport, “can fly anywhere that he wants.”

Lavrov said that the leaker of top-secret information about the U.S. government’s spying programs is free to leave Moscow despite a U.S. extradition request.
On Sunday, Snowden flew into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from Hong Kong and has been at the airport’s transit zone since then. Reports say he could consider seeking asylum from Ecuador, where he was planning to travel to after leaving Russia.
Lavrov said: “He has not violated Russian law, he has not crossed the border, he is in the transit zone of the airport and can fly anywhere that he wants.”
The Obama administration called on Russia to hand over Snowden, who is charged with espionage and theft of government property in the U.S. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected the request.
Washington has revoked Snowden’s passport, depriving him of the necessary documentation with which to travel.
The documents, disclosed by Snowden to Britain’s The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed two major spying programs run by the National Security Agency, one for gathering U.S. phone records and another, called PRISM, for tracking the use of U.S.-based web servers by American citizens and other nationals.

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