Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON - A U.S. Army intelligence analyst has been arrested in connection with the leak of classified U.S. military combat video to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com reported.
Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, the technology magazine said on its website late Sunday.
Wired said Manning was arrested at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Baghdad, and was being held in Kuwait. He has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month after boasting to a former computer hacker in an online conversation that he had leaked video of a 2007 U.S. military helicopter strike to Wikileaks, Wired said.
WikiLeaks released video in April of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad which killed two employees of the Reuters news agency and a number of other people.
Wikileaks said at the time that it had obtained the video "from a number of military whistleblowers" but did not provide any further information about how it got ahold of the footage, which it posted at Wikileaks.org and on YouTube.
Manning reportedly said he had leaked other material to Wikileaks, including separate video of a 2009 air strike in Afghanistan, a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat and 260,000 classified US diplomatic cables.
Wired said Manning had been in touch with former hacker Adrian Lamo, who contacted Army investigators and FBI agents after being told of the leaks.
"I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger," Lamo told Wired about turning Manning in to the authorities.
"He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air." Lamo said.
WikiLeaks, run by Sunshine Press, describes itself as a "non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public."
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