Sweden Defends Reversal of Warrant for Founder of WikiLeaks

STOCKHOLM — The Swedish prosecutor’s office on Sunday defended its handling of allegations made by two Swedish women against Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, saying that a senior prosecutor withdrew the arrest warrant that had been issued for Mr. Assange on a rape charge after reviewing a judgment made by a more junior official before additional information became available.

The abrupt reversal of the prosecutor’s office had added a new and bizarre turn to events involving Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian. He has been locked in a dispute with the Pentagon over WikiLeaks’ posting last month of 77,000 classified Afghan war documents on the Internet, and its announcement of plans within weeks to post 15,000 additional secret documents that he has described as even “more explosive.”

Mr. Assange and others working for WikiLeaks said that “dirty tricks” by those seeking to destroy WikiLeaks were responsible for the developments here on Saturday, when prosecutors first announced that they had issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange, then reversed course within hours. The warrant was canceled after the chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, reviewed the case and found that “there is no longer reason to believe that Mr. Assange has committed rape,” in the words of a spokeswoman for the national prosecutor’s office, Karin Rosander.

“Another prosecutor was responsible for the matter on Friday,” Mrs. Rosander said Sunday in a telephone interview. “During Saturday, a new prosecutor took over, and new information came to light. When she looked into the matter, she found there was no reason to suspect” Mr. Assange of rape, and therefore no need for the arrest warrant.

Mrs. Rosander said a separate allegation against Mr. Assange that was cited in the prosecutor’s original statement on Saturday, involving molestation, remained under investigation. “The prosecutor will begin looking into the matter tomorrow, and she estimates that she will make a decision in the coming week,” she said.

The prosecutor’s office did not feel that an accusation of molestation — a term that covers a wide range of offenses under Swedish law, including inappropriate physical contact with another adult — was enough to justify an arrest warrant, Mrs. Rosander said. A molestation conviction carries a possible fine, or up to a year in prison.

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Pending further investigation into the molestation claim, Mrs. Rosander said, the police have been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to “find” Mr. Assange, who has remained elusive since arriving in Sweden 10 days ago from Britain. He had said he hoped to establish a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks in Sweden because its press laws provide broad protections for news organizations that publish secret information. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has agreed to take on Mr. Assange as a columnist in an arrangement that would qualify him for such protections.

Mr. Assange has told reporters in recent weeks that he believes he and other WikiLeaks activists are at risk of being arrested, or being singled out in other ways, in the wake of WikiLeaks’ release of the Pentagon documents.

Early Sunday, Mr. Assange responded to efforts by The New York Times to contact him with a brief e-mail to a reporter in which he described the sexual abuse accusations as “completely baseless, as I always said.”

Previously, he had responded to the Swedish accusations in Twitter feeds, a form of communication he has favored in recent weeks in his effort to disguise his whereabouts. On Twitter, he implied that the accusations were payback for WikiLeaks’ disclosures. “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks,’ ” he said. “Now, we have the first one.”

In its Sunday editions, Aftonbladet quoted Mr. Assange as saying that the rape claims had caused damage even though they had been dropped because WikiLeaks’ “enemies” could use them to discredit the organization.

“I do not know what lies behind this. But we have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to undermine us,” Mr. Assange was quoted as saying in a phone interview from Sweden. “And I have also been warned about sex traps.”

The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Sunday that any suggestion that the Pentagon was involved in the allegations was “absurd.”

Aftonbladet also quoted a woman who it said made the accusation of molestation as saying: “The accusations against Assange are, of course, not orchestrated by the Pentagon or anybody else. Responsibility for what happened to myself and the other girl lies with a man who has a skewed attitude to women and a problem taking no for an answer.” The newspaper did not identify the woman.