Kristinn Hrafnsson

Description

Kristinn Hrafnsson (born 25 June 1962) is an Icelandic investigative journalist and spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organisation. He has worked at various newspapers in Iceland and hosted the television programme Kompás on the Icelandic channel Stöð 2, where he and his team often exposed criminal activity and corruption in high places. In February 2009, while investigating the connection between Iceland's Kaupthing Bank and Robert Tchenguiz, the programme was taken off air and Kristinn and his crew were sacked. Shortly thereafter, Kristinn was hired by RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. In August 2009, he was working on a story about Kaupthing's loan book which had just been published on the WikiLeaks webpage, when the bank got a gag order issued by the Reykjavik sheriff's office, banning RÚV from reporting on the loan book, which could be publicly accessed online via WikiLeaks. The prohibition order was withdrawn later. Kristinn was fired from RÚV in July 2010 and has since worked as an independent journalist, collaborating with WikiLeaks and stepping up as the organisation's spokesman as its founder, Julian Assange, was forced to retreat from the limelight due to persistent legal litigations. He called the December 2010 attacks upon Wikileaks a "privatisation of censorship". In 2012, in his quality of Wikileaks spokesman he defended the organization on the website of the Swedish Television against what he defined as a smear campaign by the Swedish tabloid Expressen. Kristinn has been named Icelandic journalist of the year three times, in 2004, 2007 and 2010. 30px30px This Icelandic biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. vte (via DBpedia)