DUSHANBE, May 16, 2011, Asia-Plus — On Saturday May 14, the Asia-Plus media holding and known website WikiLeaks signed here a cooperation agreement.
The Asia-Plus newspaper editor Marat Mamadshoyev says this cooperation is important. “We consider that WikiLeaks possesses topical information that people would like to receive first hand,” he noted.
Under the agreement, Asia-Plus will gain an exclusive access (in Tajikistan) to information posted on WikiLeaks’ website.
After signing the agreement, an online conversation with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently under house arrest in the United Kingdom, was held.
An interview with Mr. Julian Assange will be published in the next edition of Asia-Plus on May 18.
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by an Apache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables. In April 2011, Wikileaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
