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LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Britain has refused a request by Ecuador for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be given diplomatic status, a spokesman for Britain's Foreign Office said.
Assange has been holed up for more than five years in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he was granted asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations.
"The government of Ecuador recently requested diplomatic status for Mr Assange here in the UK," the spokesman said. "The UK did not grant that request, nor are we in talks with Ecuador on this matter."
"Ecuador knows that the way to resolve this issue is for Julian Assange to leave the embassy to face justice," the spokesman said.
In May, Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into the rape allegations, but British police have said Assange would still be arrested for breaching bail conditions if he left the embassy.
Assange's name has appeared in an Ecuadorean government database of citizen identification numbers, fuelling speculation that he may have received citizenship from the Andean country. former computer hacker enraged Washington by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables that laid bare often highly critical U.S. appraisals of world leaders from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Saudi royal family.
For some, Assange is a cyber hero for exposing government abuses of power and championing free speech but to others he is a criminal who has undermined the security of the West by exposing secrets.
Assange always denied the rape allegations and said they were a ploy to get him whisked off to the United States.