Why did Ecuador give up Assange after seven years?

Hours after Julian Assange was ousted from his diplomatic refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the country released a laundry list of alleged transgressions which brought the WikiLeaks founder’s seven-year residency to an end.

Foreign Minister José Valencia and Interior Minister María Paula Romo accused Assange of riding scooters around the cramped embassy hallways, insulting staff and smearing feces on the walls.

But while Ecuador had undoubtedly tired of its London house guest, the motivations for stripping Assange of his asylum and allowing in officers of the Metropolitan Police are likely to have been more complex.

LEFT: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Belmarsh Magistrates Court on February 8, 2011 in London, England. Assange was in court challenging a proposed extradition from the UK to Sweden on grounds of alleged sexual assault against two women. RIGHT: Julian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates court on April 11, 2019. after his arrest and removal from the Ecuadorian embassy.

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WikiLeaks had already been needling the Ecuadorian authorities in other ways. For months, Assange had been pursuing a legal action against the Ecuadorian government, accusing it of violating his rights by introducing strict new house rules for living at the embassy. An Ecuadorian judge rejected the assertions last October.

Quito was also irritated by Assange’s support for the Catalonian independence movement: Its Foreign Ministry told Assange to refrain from making statements that could impair Ecuador’s relations with other countries, including Spain.

More recently, WikiLeaks got personal. On March 25, WikiLeaks posted a tweet bringing attention to a corruption probe that Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno is facing. It linked to an anonymously registered website hosting a vast trove of leaked emails, text messages and other documents pertaining to Moreno’s private life.

Julian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates court on April 11, 2019 in London, England. After weeks of speculation Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by Scotland Yard Police Officers inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Central London this morning. Ecuador's President, Lenin Moreno, withdrew Assange's Asylum after seven years citing repeated violations to international conventions.

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The Ecuadorian government blamed WikiLeaks for the leaked documents, dubbed the INA Papers, an allegation that WikiLeaks denies.

For WikiLeaks and its supporters, the Ecuadorian government tried to use the INA Papers leak as yet another pretext to terminate Assange’s asylum.

Moreno has denied any wrongdoing. The attorney general’s office has launched an investigation into the allegations. WikiLeaks denied any involvement in the release of the INA Papers, but that hasn’t stopped Moreno from pointing the finger at Assange and WikiLeaks.

Assange does not have the right to “hack accounts or personal phones,” Moreno told the Ecuadorian Radio Broadcasters’ Association last Tuesday

Over the weekend, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Relations ramped up the rhetoric against Assange when it put out a fiery statement rejecting “the fake news that has circulated in the last few days on social media, many of them spread by an organization linked to Mr. Julian Assange.”

Relations between Assange and Ecuador deteriorated further on Wednesday when WikiLeaks called a press conference and claimed the group had discovered a spying operation against Assange from within the embassy.

Speaking to reporters in London, Kristinn Hrafnsson, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said Ecuador had made surreptitious video and audio recordings of Assange and his interactions at the embassy, including a medical examination and meetings with legal representatives.

Julian Assange gestures from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on April 11, 2019. Assange, founder of the website WikiLeaks, has been a key figure in major leaks of classified government documents, cables and videos.

Assange holds a copy of The Guardian newspaper in London on July 26, 2010, a day after WikiLeaks posted more than 90,000 classified documents related to the Afghanistan War.

Assange attends a seminar at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation in Stockholm on August 14, 2010. Six days later, Swedish prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest based on allegations of sexual assault from two women. Assange has always denied wrongdoing.

Assange, in London, displays a page from WikiLeaks on October 23, 2010. The day before, WikiLeaks released approximately 400,000 classified military documents from the Iraq War.

Assange and his bodyguards are seen after a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 2010. It was the month WikiLeaks began releasing diplomatic cables from US embassies.

Assange sits behind the tinted window of a police vehicle in London on December 14, 2010. Assange had turned himself in to London authorities on December 7 and was released on bail and put on house arrest on December 16. In February 2011, a judge ruled in support of Assange's extradition to Sweden. Assange's lawyers filed an appeal.

In October 2011, a month after WikiLeaks released more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, Assange speaks to demonstrators from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Assange leaves the High Court in London in December 2011. He was taking his extradition case to the British Supreme Court.

Assange leaves the Supreme Court in February 2012. In May of that year, the court denied his appeal against extradition.

Assange addresses the media and his supporters from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on August 19, 2012. A few days earlier, Ecuador announced that it had granted asylum to Assange. In his public address, Assange demanded that the United States drop its "witch hunt" against WikiLeaks.

Assange speaks from a window of the Ecuadorian Embassy in December 2012.

Assange addresses the Oxford Union Society from the Ecuadorian Embassy in January 2013.

Assange appears with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino on the balcony of the embassy in June 2013.

Assange speaks during a panel discussion at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2014.

Assange attends a news conference inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2014.

Assange is seen on a video screen in March 2015, during an event on the sideline of a United Nations Human Rights Council session.

Assange, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy, holds up a United Nations report in February 2016. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Assange was being arbitrarily detained by the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Assange speaks to the media in May 2017, after Swedish prosecutors had dropped their investigation of rape allegations against Assange. But Assange acknowledged he was unlikely to walk out of the embassy any time soon. "The UK has said it will arrest me regardless," he said. "The US CIA Director (Mike) Pompeo and the US attorney general have said that I and other WikiLeaks staff have no ... First Amendment rights, that my arrest and the arrest (of) my other staff is a priority. That is not acceptable."

Assange was seen for the first time in months during a hearing via teleconference in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2018. The hearing was then postponed due to translation difficulties.

A van displays images of Assange and Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who supplied thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Friday, April 5. A senior Ecuadorian official said no decision has been made to expel Assange from the embassy. According to WikiLeaks tweets, sources had told the organization that Assange could be kicked out of the embassy within "hours to days."

A screen grab from video footage shows the dramatic moment when Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy by police on April 11, 2019. Assange was arrested for "failing to surrender to the court" over a warrant issued in 2012. Officers made the initial move to detain Arrange after Ecuador withdrew his asylum and invited authorities into the embassy, citing the Australian's bad behavior.

Assange gestures from the window of a prison van as he is driven into Southwark Crown Court in London on May 1, 2019, before being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012.

A sketch depicts Assange appearing at the Old Bailey courthouse in London for a ruling in his extradition case on Monday, January 4. A judge rejected a US request to extradite Assange, saying that such a move would be "oppressive" by reason of his mental health.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

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‘Biggest betrayal’

Assange is Australian but had been granted Ecuadorian naturalization in 2017. Less than 24 hours after WikiLeaks’ press conference, Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship had been revoked, his asylum rescinded, and embassy officials had invited the Metropolitan Police over to forcibly remove him.

Moves against WikiLeaks were not just taking place in London. In Ecuador, the Interior Ministry announced that it had arrested a “close collaborator” of Assange at Quito’s airport as he was preparing to fly to Japan on Thursday.

Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo told CNN that the individual under arrest is Ola Bini, a Swedish software developer who she said had visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several times.

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Romo said at a press conference Thursday that Bini, Assange and WikiLeaks have been trying to destabilize the government of Moreno. She accused Bini of working with with Ricardo Pati?o, who was foreign minister during the government of former President Rafael Correa, who granted asylum to Assange.

“For several years now, one of the key members of the WikiLeaks organization and a person close to Assange has lived in Ecuador,” Romo said at the press conference.

Correa told CNN Thursday that the decision by his successor to revoke Assange’s asylum status was “the biggest betrayal perhaps in Latin American history.”

Hyperbole, perhaps. But whatever the truth, the story of Assange’s turbulent 2,488 days in the Ecuadorian Embassy isn’t over yet.

CNN’s Claudia Rebaza contributed to this story.