US President Barack Obama said Thursday he would not use the US military to try to intercept a flight carrying fugitive national security leaker, Edward Snowden, should he leave Russia.
"I am not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker," Obama said, adding that nor he had called top leaders in China or Russia over the case, because it was purely a legal issue.
Snowden was believed to be still at Moscow airport as of Thursday, and whether any country will offer him political asylum is still in doubt.
Reuters quoted a source at Russian airline Aeroflot as saying that neither Snowden nor his traveling companion Sarah Harrison, a researcher for Wikileaks, had booked a seat on Thursday's flight to Cuba's capital Havana.
The former Central Intelligence Agency reportedly flew to Moscow on Sunday after staying in Hong Kong for a month.
As of Thursday, he was believed to be remaining in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport after Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed his location on Tuesday.
Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said on Sunday that Snowden has applied for asylum, but he indicated on Wednesday during a visit to Malaysia that it could take the country as long as two months to make a decision, as was the case for Julian Assange, the founder of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.
Niu Xinchun, a researcher with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that Ecuador is well aware of the consequences of receiving Snowden.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has given Snowden some hope on Wednesday, saying that Snowden is almost sure to get political asylum if he files a formal request, as political asylum is "an international human rights institution to protect the persecuted."
Kirill Kabanov, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, said he had asked his colleagues to consider asking the Russian leadership to grant political asylum to Snowden.
Rimsky Yuen, Justice Secretary of Hong Kong, said local immigration records listed Snowden's middle name as Joseph, but the US government used James on extradition papers and referred to him as Edward J. Snowden in others.
However, the US Justice Department rejected the claims, and an anonymous source said Hong Kong "was simply trying to create a pretext for not acting on the provisional arrest request."
Yang Yujun, a spokesman of the Ministry of National Defense, said Thursday that the Snowden incident is just like a prism, refracting the true face and hypocritical words and deeds of some countries on Internet security, adding there is always a fair public opinion on right and wrong.
Agencies contributed to this story