Hacker Gary McKinnon, an Asperger's sufferer who broke into US military computers and who has fought a decade-long fight against extradition, will not be sent to the United States, Britain said Tuesday. "Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes, but there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill," interior minister Theresa May told parliament.
May, the Home Secretary, said extradition would breach 46-year-old McKinnon's human rights as his psychiatrists believed there was a high risk that he would attempt suicide were he sent to the United States. "I have concluded that Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights," she said.
"I have therefore withdrawn the extradition order against Mr McKinnon." British prosecutors will now decide whether to pursue action against the hacker through the British courts, May added. McKinnon was arrested in London in 2002 for hacking into dozens of Pentagon and NASA computers, leaving 300 machines at a naval air station immobilised just after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
He has never denied the hacking, claiming he was looking for classified US documents on UFOs. He could have faced up to 60 years in a US jail for the breaches, which the United States says caused $800,000 (615,000 euros) worth of damage. The hacker, who has become a symbol of the campaign to revamp Britain's extradition deal with the United States, lost appeals in Britain's House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights during his decade-long fight.
Prime Minister David Cameron had raised the issue of his extradition twice with US President Barack Obama. McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's, a form of autism, in 2007, after an expert on the condition watched him in a television interview and contacted the hacker's lawyer.
McKinnon's mother Janis Sharp, who has campaigned vigorously for her son to be spared extradition, expressed delight at the decision. "Thank you Theresa May from the bottom of my heart. I always knew you had the strength and courage to do the right thing," she said. But David Rivkin, former White House counsel to two US presidents, said the decision would go down "very badly" in the United States.
"It's really deplorable," he told BBC radio. "The justification by the home secretary is laughable. You have an individual who says he is going to commit suicide - American prisons and penal institutions have an excellent track record of stopping people who are trying to commit suicide.