Carl Court / AFP - Getty Images
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hold placards as they demonstrate outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Sunday.
By Alastair Jamieson and Duncan Golestani, NBC News
LONDON -- From a second-floor window of his?refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy,?WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prepared to weigh into the diplomatic standoff between Britain and Ecuador on Sunday - the latest bizarre twist in the international legal drama over his future.
Ecuador on Thursday?granted political asylum to the former computer hacker who incensed the United States and its allies by using his WikiLeaks website to leak hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic and military cables in 2010.
WikiLeaks said that Assange would make a statement from the embassy on Sunday - his first public comment in two months since he sought refuge there. Media reports in London suggested he would appear on a small balcony next to the Ecuadorean flag.
Britain has already made it clear it will arrest the Australian the moment he steps out of the property.?
"I cannot go into details of that for security reasons," a spokesman for WikiLeaks said when asked how Assange would make his statement at the embassy.
The embassy is in a west London building shared with other tenants and has no vehicular access except via the street, meaning Assange could not even appear in its doorway without risking immediate arrest.
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About 40 police officers surrounded the building on Sunday, while?a workman inside could be seen ?prising the hinges off a door leading to a small balcony on the corner of the embassy, indicating that Assange could avoid arrest by speaking from that perch.
UK refuses WikiLeaks' Assange safe passage to Ecuador
With a police helicopter hovering overhead and protestors using megaphones, the international legal over Assange's future has become a spectacle in what is an upscale area of London, just a few meters away from department store, Harrods.
The former hacker is wanted in Sweden for questioning regarding allegations of rape and sexual assault and Britain has said he will not be granted safe passage out of his Ecuadorean embassy refuge, which enjoys diplomatic status.
Baltasar Garzon, a Spanish jurist and prominent human rights investigator who heads Assange's legal team, was also expected to speak in a separate address outside the building ahead of Assange's appearance.
The United Kingdom is fighting the controversial decision and will not grant Julian Assange safe passage. NBC's Duncan Golestani reports.
A group of about 20 Assange supporters, many of whom have slept on sheets of cardboard outside the building since Wednesday, have decorated barriers with messages of support for Assange.
Assange's attempt to avoid extradition has provoked a diplomatic tussle between Britain and Ecuador, which said London had threatened to raid its embassy and cast the dispute as an arrogant European power treating a Latin American nation like a colony.?
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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