Assange to fight molestation claim

He said that he had been forewarned by Australian intelligence on August 11 to expect a campaign against him, though it was unclear who was behind it.

“It is clearly a smear campaign … the only question is who was involved,” Assange, who is an Australian national, said.

“We can have some suspicions about who would benefit, but without direct evidence I would not be willing to make a direct allegation.”

Eva Finne, Sweden’s chief prosecutor, said on Monday that she will make her decision on how to proceed later this week.

Accusations ‘untrue’

Assange said that the accusations were completely untrue and that this was just one of many attempts to discredit him.

“This is the first sexual related we’ve had, but we have seen 14 fabricated
documents, for example, that have appeared in various places about this organisation which have been shown to be clear fakes,” he said. 

“So there are significant forces pushing to perceive things in a particular way.”

Authorities withdrew the warrantafter Finne reviewed the evidence, deciding there was “no longer reason to believe” Assange had committed rape, Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for Finne, said.

“You can’t call it a mistake because the prosecutor in question has to make a decision based on the information available at the moment of the decision,” Rosander told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

The charges against Assange, which come around a month after Wikileaks incensed the US government by releasing a trove of American military informationabout the war in Afghanistan, quickly spread around the internet.

New document leaks

After the Swedish tabloid Expressen first published reportsthat the arrest warrant had been issued for Assange, Wikileaks responded on Twitter:“We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks.’ Now we have the first one.

“No one here has been contacted by Swedish police. Needless to say this will prove hugely distracting.”

Assange’s organisation caused controversy in Julywhen it released 75,000 classified US military reports containing information about the Nato war effort in Afghanistan.

The US government condemned the release of the documents, saying the website had “blood on its hands” for naming people who had helped its military against groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and ordered Wikileaks to return the files.

Assange told Al Jazeera those claims were “an extraordinary thing to hear”.

“The Pentagon so far says it not aware of any incident of people coming to harm by what we have released,” he said. 

“At the time of the release we took aside 15,000 documents that we believed needed extra careful review and those are the documents we are reviewing and will be released.”

Assange said the documents will be released within the next two to four weeks.

Alleged victims

Two women have made the allegations against Assange, according to Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennan, reporting from London.

One woman claimed Assange raped her last weekend in Stockholm, while another alleged he molested her on Tuesday in a separate town in Sweden, Brennan said.

“I think it’s quite natural that these rumours happen in a very famous case like this, and I’m not surprised at all,” Rosander, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera.

She said she could not give any details on the allegations.

Assange was in Sweden last week partly to apply for a publishing certificate to maintain the advantages it receives from the country’s whistle-blowing protection laws.

Many of Sweden’s servers are located in Sweden.