US News

International arrest warrant issued for WikiLeaks boss

A Swedish court on Thursday approved the arrest of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, to face charges of rape and sexual molestation.

An international arrest warrant was being prepared with his actual whereabouts unclear. However a new statement from his British lawyer seemed to suggest he was currently in the UK.

“I request the District Court of Stockholm to detain Mr. Assange in his absence, suspected of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion,” Swedish director of prosecutions Marianne Ny said in a statement released before Thursday’s hearing, which was not attended by Assange. “The reason for my request is that we need to interrogate him. So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogation.”

A warrant was first issued for Assange’s arrest on Aug. 20 by another prosecutor, but was withdrawn just hours later.

Ny, head of the department that oversees prosecution of sex crimes, reopened the rape probe against the 39-year-old Australian on Sept. 1, but did not request his detention and allowed him to leave Sweden.

Assange has admitted meeting the two women at the center of the Swedish rape and sexual molestation investigation, whose names have not been made public, but he refused to say if he had sex with either of them, calling it “a private matter.”

A British lawyer acting for Assange said Thursday that he was entirely innocent of the rape accusation as “the basis for the rape charge purely seems to constitute a post-facto dispute over consensual, but unprotected sex days after the event.”

Mark Stephens accused the Swedish authorities of failing to communicate the full nature of the accusation against Assange. Stephens added that the “false allegations and bizarre legal interpretations” had ruined his client’s reputation. “Thousands of news articles and 3.6 million web pages now contain his name and the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, three out of four webpages that mention Mr. Assange’s name also now mention the word ‘rape’.”

Assange has hinted the allegations against him could be part of a “smear campaign” aimed at discrediting his website, which is locked in a dispute with the Pentagon over the release of secret US documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US intelligence services “are probably very happy now,” he said in an interview in September, adding however that “mentioning their involvement is for now only speculation.”

WikiLeaks last month published an unprecedented 400,000 classified US documents on the Iraq war and posted 77,000 secret US files on the Afghan conflict in July.

Two days before the allegations against Assange were made public in August, he had applied for a work and residency permit in Sweden, where some of WikiLeaks’ servers are situated, but his application was turned down on Oct. 18.

He last spoke publicly in Geneva on Nov. 4, when he said he was considering requesting asylum and basing his website in neutral Switzerland.

WikiLeaks also said last week it had registered its first known legal entity in Iceland — a business that so far has no office or activity.