London: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by the British police today on a Swedish arrest warrant relating to charges of sexual assault.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one Swedish case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another. He denies the allegations.
Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens told reporters on Monday night in London that the Metropolitan Police called him to say they had received the arrest warrant from Sweden for Assange, who has been staying at an undisclosed location in Britain.
Mark Stephens added: "He has not been charged with anything. It's about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law. A full hearing of his extradition case would have to be heard within 28 days."
In Sweden, a WikiLeaks spokesman called for action against those who have attacked Assange. "There have been death threats to his life and incitement to murder," he added. Earlier Monday, Swiss authorities stripped Assange of a key fundraising tool -- his new bank account -- and his secret-spilling website fended off more suspected computer attacks as it maneuvered to stay online.
Stephens said the charges in Sweden stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex." Over the weekend, the lawyer said the Swedish investigation -- which has involved prosecutors overruling each other and disputes over whether the most serious allegation constitutes rape -- had turned into a "political stunt."
Assange has been hiding at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of US diplomatic cables on the Internet last week. The organisation's room for maneuver is narrowing by the day. It has been battered by web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and is the subject of a criminal investigation in the United States, where officials say the release jeopardised national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.
Australia had said it would give consular help to Assange if he was arrested abroad and noted he was also entitled to return home. But Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland also condemned the WikiLeaks document leaks as harming security and said Australia is obligated to help any criminal investigation into Assange's activities.
WikiLeaks has been under intense international scrutiny after disclosing classified US diplomatic cables and tens of thousands of classified US military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unprecedented disclosures have embarrassed the US and other governments worldwide and prompted US officials to pressure the WikiLeaks site and its facilitators.
American web companies Amazon.com, Paypal, and EveryDNS had pulled the plug on their relationship with WikiLeaks one after the other. The decision by Amazon to yank the site from its servers -- over alleged terms of service violations -- saw WikiLeaks fall back on a Swedish host. The French government has also promised a crackdown on its Web presence there, while governments such as China have moved to block the website altogether.
In contrast to official moves against Wikileaks, an unlikely band of computer-savvy advocates were riding to its rescue, determined to ensure free information via the Internet. These geek-warriors described their efforts as new form of guerrilla combat, where sophisticated online protests were replacing traditional street marches.
"It's the start of the information war," said Pascal Gloor, vice president of the Swiss Pirate Party, whose Swiss Web address, wikileaks.ch, has been serving as a mainstay for WikiLeaks traffic.
"There is a whole new generation, digital natives, born with the Internet, that understands the freedom of communication," he told The Associated Press. "It's not a left-right thing anymore. It's a generational thing between the politicians who don't understand that it's too late for them to regulate the Internet and the young who use technology every day."
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