Julian Assange

Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, publisher and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, an organisation which he founded in 2006. Subject to extradition to Sweden for legal proceedings, he was granted political asylum by Ecuador in August 2012. He has remained in Ecuador's London embassy and, as of February 2016, he is unable to leave without expectation of arrest.

In February 2016 a UN panel issued a non-binding legal opinion that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention and should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The findings were rejected by UK and Swedish prosecutors, as well as UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Philip Hammond.

Early life

Assange was born in the north Queensland city of Townsville, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born.

When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979, and Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of the Australian New Age group The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty different Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria.

Dunblane school massacre

The Dunblane school massacre was one of the deadliest firearms incidents in UK history, when gunman Thomas Hamilton killed sixteen children and one teacher at Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland on 13 March 1996, before killing himself.

Public debate about the killings centred on gun control laws, including public petitions calling for a ban on private ownership of handguns and an official enquiry, the Cullen Report. In response to this debate, two new firearms Acts were passed, which effectively made private ownership of handguns illegal in Great Britain.

Shooting

On the morning of Wednesday 13 March 1996, former scout leader Thomas Hamilton, aged 43, was witnessed scraping ice off his van at approximately 8:15 am outside his home at Kent Road in Stirling. He left a short time afterwards and drove approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) north to Dunblane in his white van. He arrived on the grounds of Dunblane Primary School at around 9:30 am and parked his van near to a telegraph pole in the car park of the school. Hamilton severed the cables at the bottom of the telegraph pole, which served nearby houses, with a set of pliers before making his way across the car park towards the school buildings.