New York: After he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables, Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, is getting it back with the leak of a 68-page confidential Swedish police report that sheds new light on the alleged sexual misconduct by the Australian.
The Swedish report traces events over a four-day period in August this year when 39-year-old Assange had what he has described as consensual sexual relationships with two Swedish women.
Their accounts, which form the basis of an extradition case against Assange, state that their encounters with him began consensually, but became non-consensual when he persisted in having unprotected sex with them in defiance of their insistence that he use a condom, New York Times reports.
The Times, which obtained a redacted form of the report in Swedish, says it is a preliminary summary of the evidence taken by investigators in August after their initial interviews with the two women and with Assange, who left Sweden for Britain in early October but subsequently refused to return to Sweden for further questioning.
Assange has told friends in Britain that he concluded that the Swedish case was being driven by a desire to punish him for WikiLeaks' disclosures, and to fatally weaken the organisation.
The Swedish document traces the accounts given by the two women of their intimate encounters with Assange.
Both women say that Assange first agreed to use a condom and then refused, in the first instance by continuing with sex after the condom broke, and in the second by having sex without using a condom with a woman who was asleep, the Times reports.
Assange himself has declined to publicly address the women's accounts directly, both before his December 7 arrest on the Swedish extradition warrant and since he was released from a 10-day period in a London jail on Thursday after
posting a $310,000 bail.
But he has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and has long insisted that he is the victim of a political conspiracy.
He has said that the case presented in the London courts was "a smear attempt," and that the impending publication of the Swedish police report amounted to "another smear attempt."
Assange told the BBC that he did not know "precisely who is behind" the "conspiracy" against him, although his supporters have flooded the Internet with charges that the CIA is working to discredit him.
And in his police interview, he said the women's accounts included "incredible lies."
Comments
0 comment