You're reading: WikiLeaks has data from 2.4 million Syrian emails

LONDON — The secret-spilling group WikiLeaks said Thursday it was in the process of publishing material from 2.4 million Syrian emails — many of which it said came from official government accounts.

WikiLeaks’ Sarah
Harrison told journalists at London’s Frontline Club that the emails
reveal interactions between the Syrian government and Western companies,
although she declined to go into much further detail.

Harrison
quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as saying that “the material is
embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s external
opponents.”

WikiLeaks only posted a handful of the documents to
its website Thursday, but the disclosure — whose source WikiLeaks has
not made clear — wouldn’t be the first major leak of Syrian emails.

In
February, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published excerpts of what it
said were emails hacked from Syrian servers by Anonymous, the shadowy
Internet activist group. In March, Britain’s Guardian newspaper
published emails it sourced to Syrian opposition activists.

The
messages appeared to catch the glamorous wife of Syrian President Bashar
Assad shopping for pricey shoes while her country slipped toward civil
war.

Harrison said the WikiLeaks emails dated from August 2006 to
March 2012 and originated from hundreds of different domains, including
Syria’s ministry of presidential affairs.

Harrison said her group was “statistically confident” that the body of material was genuine.

Assange,
who is currently seeking asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London,
was not at the brief presentation. He is wanted by British police for
possible extradition to Sweden to face questions about alleged sexual
misconduct there.

He has denied wrongdoing but faces arrest if he leaves the embassy.

Harrison
acknowledged that WikiLeaks is facing “a difficult time at the moment”
but said “we are continuing to work through that.”