The founder of controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and aides alleged dirty tricks yesterday after he was accused of rape in Sweden.
“The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing,” said a Twitter message attributed to Assange, whose website is in a stand-off with the Pentagon over secret military documents on Afghanistan.
A colleague of the 39-year-old Australian, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told AFP: “Julian denies these allegations and says they are false.”
“Julian Assange is wanted for two different issues, one of them is that he’s suspected of rape in Sweden,” the spokesman for the Swedish prosecutor’s office, Karin Rosander, said earlier.
Prosecutor Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand told the TT news agency that the rape was allegedly committed at Enkoping, near Stockholm, and an assault on another woman in the capital.
Hrafnsson, who spoke to AFP from Iceland, said Assange knew nothing of the charges until he read about them in the Swedish daily Expressen, which broke the story.
“There are powerful organisations who want to do harm to Wikileaks,” Hrafnson said, adding that Assange was still in Sweden and would “go to the police very quickly”.
In another statement carried on the website of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, Assange was quoted as asking why the accusations had surfaced now.
“It’s an interesting question,” he added.
Assange recently announced at a press conference in Stockholm that the whistleblower website was set to publish a final batch of 15,000 secret documents on the war in Afghanistan in “a couple of weeks”.
The former computer hacker insisted Wikileaks “will not be threatened by the Pentagon or any other group”.
The Pentagon for its part has said it would not negotiate a “sanitised” release of the documents, as Wikileaks had suggested it might.
Wikileaks has already released nearly 77,000 secret papers, sparking charges that it had endangered the lives of informants and others named therein.
The website says it had repeatedly asked the Pentagon for help analysing the remaining documents, and Assange said at the weekend he wanted to avoid publishing the “names of innocent parties that are under reasonable threat,” but needed help.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has pronounced Wikileaks “guilty” on moral grounds for releasing the documents and accused the website of recklessness.
General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, blasted the release as “reprehensible” and said Wikileaks had placed people working with the international forces at risk.