No sign of Snowden at Moscow airport
Also, an Ecuador official says it could take months to grant the leaker asylum.
MOSCOW - Moscow's main airport swarmed with media from around the globe Wednesday, but the man they were looking for - National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden - was nowhere to be seen. The mystery of the former spy's whereabouts only deepened a day after President Vladimir Putin said Snowden was in the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport.
In the airport were ordinary scenes of duty-free shopping, snoozing travelers, and tourists sipping coffee, but no trace of America's most famous fugitive. If Putin's statement is true, it means that Snowden has effectively lived a life of airport limbo since his weekend flight from Hong Kong, especially with his American passport now revoked by U.S. authorities.
In a further twist, Ecuador's foreign minister said Wednesday that it could take months to decide whether to grant asylum to Snowden and that the Latin American nation would need to take into consideration its relations with the United States when doing so. Speaking during a visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Ricardo Patino compared Snowden's case to that of Julian Assange, the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, who has been given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
"It took us two months to make a decision in the case of Assange," Patino told reporters, "so do not expect us to make a decision sooner this time."
In Quito, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said Wednesday that media coverage of Snowden was distracting the world from the surveillance programs that the leaker revealed.
Via Twitter, President made his strongest comments to date about the case in response to a Washington Post editorial that referred to him as "the autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador" and accused him of a double standard for welcoming a whistleblower while allegedly stifling critics at home.
"The world order isn't only unjust, it's immoral," Correa said, taking an aggressive new rhetorical tack on the case.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, threatened Ecuador's trade arrangements with the United States if it granted asylum to Snowden. Menendez urged Russia to hand him over to the United States.