Alan Rusbridger: Outgoing Guardian editor confronted by Wikileaks over their editor Julian Assange's detainment

The pro-transparency agency hijacked his resignation message on Twitter

Alan Rusbridger is to let a ‘younger pair of hands take over the reins’ (Getty Images)

Alan Rusbridger’s last day as the editor of The Guardian didn’t go perhaps as smoothly as he’d expected it to.

He announced his farewell after 20 long years to his followers on Twitter.

But in among the support and well-wishes lurked a comment that few expected.

It came in the form of Wikileaks – the pro-transparency site edited by Julian Assange, famed for publishing classified information from anonymous sources.

And it read like this:

Assange has sought refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy since Sweden issued a detention order in 2010 requiring him to be arrested and extradited to the country to face questioning over the alleged sexual assault of two women.

If he were to cooperate with British and Swedish authorities, his legal team protest, he would be exposed to the US Department of Justice’s ongoing criminal investigation into Wikileaks.

In 2010, Wikileaks became internationally renowned when it began publishing thousands of files of US intelligence – including warlogs from Iraq – in collaboration with news organisations like The Guardian.

Assange and Wikileaks have supported former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to flee from Hong Kong to Russia, where he has secured temporary asylum.

Sarah Tisdall was a former Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) clerical officer jailed after she leaked classified British government documents to The Guardian. She was caught after the paper complied with a court order to hand over the files, which were later identified as having come from a FCO copying machine.