Christine Assange, Julian’s mother, made an impassioned appeal to authorities via Australian radio.
“He's my son and I love him and obviously I don't want him hunted down and jailed. I'm reacting as any mother would. I'm distressed. A lot of stuff that's written about me and Julian is untrue.”
Admittedly, much of the Assange family has been made in the press. In one misunderstanding, an Australian paper accused Christine Assange of being a political “puppet master,” responsible for influencing her son’s oversight of WikiLeaks. But other sources call the story inaccurate, the result of a semantic gaffe.
“Christine Assange runs a children’s puppet theater in Queensland, not a shadowy secret society bent on a New World Order,” one source was quoted as saying. The paper responsible has yet to print a retraction.
A Middle Eastern wire service also ran a recent piece in which Christine Assange, supposedly intoxicated, veered off topic during a phone interview to describe her son’s “miraculous virgin birth.”
“When I first carved that little albino puppet and wished on a star to make him a real boy, I had no idea life for Julian would become so difficult. He was supposed to be enchanted. I suppose one must be careful about what one wishes for.”
The broadcast was later exposed as a hoax, cobbled together from sound bytes of David Hasselhoff, a Disney cartoon and a 1974 interview with musician Edgar Winter. Media insiders have not only cried foul on these publications but have accused Interpol of sponsoring the bad press.
Interpol officials deny any involvement in the stories, claiming that these tactics would produce no actionable intelligence in the manhunt.
As of this report, international police agents have yet to locate Julian Assange, but they say they will be following sources such as WikiLeaks closely to see if anyone divulges the fugitive’s whereabouts.
“It’s a great place to come by hard-to-find information,” one Interpol agent stated. “We use it often.”