E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Snowden departed Hong Kong for a ‘third country,’ government says
Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked top-secret documents about about U.S. surveillance programs, has left Hong Kong “on his own accord for a third country,” the government here said Sunday afternoon.

Snowden is heading to Moscow, according to a report from the South China Morning Post. The newspaper reported that he boarded commercial flight Aeroflot SU213 from Chep Lap Kok airport at 11:04 a.m. He is scheduled to arrive at Moscow’s Shermetyevo International Airport at 5:15 p.m. (9:15 a.m. EDT)

U.S. officials are also seeking to extradite him to the United States to stand trial on criminal charges.

Snowden’s final destination is unclear. Russian news agency Interfax reported that Snowden was booked on a flight to Cuba with the ultimate destination of Venezuela. Ecuador and Iceland have also been mentioned as possibilities.

Snowden is apparently being aided in his travel by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that published hundreds of thousands of classified documents. The group posted on Twitter about 5 a.m. EDT that Snowden was “currently over Russian airspace accompanied by WikiLeaks legal advisors.” Snowden has drawn comparisons to Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who provided the secret files to WikiLeaks.

The Hong Kong government said that documents from the U.S. government requesting a warrant for his arrest “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” And so it has asked the United States to provide “additional information.”
Posted by: tipper 2013-06-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=370804