Russian official: Snowden accepts Venezuelan offer

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Tom Grundy, an activist, blogger and co-organizer supporting Edward Snowden's campaign, browses the live chat with Snowden on the Guardian website in his house in Hong Kong Monday, June 17, 2013. Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, is defending his disclosure of top-secret U.S. spying programs in an online chat Monday with Britain's Guardian newspaper and attacked U.S. officials for calling him a traitor. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Tags:

laws, european union, CIA, national/world

MOSCOW -- NSA leaker Edward Snowden accepted Venezuela's offer of political asylum, according to the Twitter account of a Russian lawmaker with close ties to the Kremlin. However, the tweet disappeared a few minutes later.

It was not possible to immediately reach Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee who has acted as an unofficial point-man for the Kremlin on the Snowden affair, on Tuesday.

Snowden, who revealed details of a U.S. intelligence program to monitor Internet activity, came to Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on June 23 and was believed to be headed for Cuba. But he did not board that flight and has not seen publicly since. He is widely believed to still be in the airport's transit zone.