Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, might possibly have been fooled to believe he had attained recordings of phone calls from Icelandic MPs.
News media RÚV claims to have source material supporting this.
An US website has released a document, which is said to originate from the US Army, exposing online conversations between two people, namely Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, formerly named Bradley Manning.
The conversations took place in March 2010, two months before Manning’s arrest.
Assange used the nickname “Nathaniel Frank” and but Manning “Nobody”. During the conversation Assange told Manning that WikiLeaks had attained recordings of phone calls from the Icelandic Parliament, from November 2009 till February 2010.
The document, released by Wired.com, has a stamp on it suggesting that it was used as evidence during Manning’s hearing, RÚV reports.
In February 2010, a mysterious laptop was found at the Parliament causing suspicion that it was being used to try and attain data from laptops belonging to the Members of Parliament.
Assange told Manning in the online conversation that an informant had handed him 10 gigabytes of data from the Icelandic banking system and that the informant had been arrested because of this but offered 15 million ISK for being quiet about the info.
On Saturday, RÚV claimed that Assange was tricked into believing the data he’d been given contained the recordings. Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks spokesman, told RÚV that he had never heard that the organization had attained such recordings.
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