WikiLeaks.com’s Founder Accused of Rape in Sweden

Julian Assange denied all accusations on a WikiLeaks.com Twitter page saying that the accusations against him are not true, and “are without base”. A rape charge could carry the penalty of prison, while a charge of molestation, which in Sweden is not restricted to children only, would not carry the same penalty.

Assange was reported last week in Sweden, but the police could not make contact with him. The next step is now to contact and interview him, the spokeswoman for the procurator’s office explained.

Assange choose Sweden to host some of the servers of his site, he told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, because of the privacy laws in the U.S. He told the same newspaper that he was kind of seeking sanctuary in Sweden after the leak on confidential information he published on his site.

The WikiLeaks.com team published on the site a post saying they thought highly of Assange and that they were supporting him on this.

The site WikiLeaks.com was in the central of an immense scandal last month as it began publishing documents extracted from classified military records. These documents were depicting the situation in Afghanistan and were mainly reports of combat, covert, and espionage operations. They also contained, and by their publishing gave away, American military strategies in Afghanistan.

At first the Pentagon tried to play down the importance of the documents, by asserting they were not important. Based on their content then they were able to assess that he who stole them from the military was not a top-ranking military officer, and so the inquiry singled out Bradley Manning who was already standing accused for prior felonies of this sort, like sharing with people at home video recordings of the combat operations, or uploading on his private PC documents he was not supposed to because his computer didn’t have the requested security protection level necessary for this.

The same publication of documents sparked tension between Pakistan and the Coalition Force allies, as documents were published containing information regarding ties of the Pakistani regime with the Taliban insurgents.

The scandal reached a boiling point when President Karzai of Afghanistan deplored the careless uploading of documents containing the names of Afghan people who collaborated with the CF in many ways, gathering information being the most important of them.

Up until now the American military authorities have maintained their reaction within reasonable democratic levels. Now Assange is arrested in absentia in a foreign country. If he is neither a rapist nor a molester, then he is a hunted man and has made very powerful enemies. Anyway, for the time being he continues to say that no pressure will make him stop, alleging by force of innuendo that he may be set up in this Swedish business.11