Swedish police "bamboozled" women to file sex case: Assange

LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, fighting a Swedish extradition warrant, today said he fears that he would not get "natural justice" in Sweden where the police "bamboozled" two women to accuse him of sexual assault.

The 39-year-old Australian is currently free on bail in the UK while facing the extradition proceedings to Sweden.

Sweden wants Britain to extradite Assange to face questioning over allegations from two Swedish women that he raped one of them and sexually assaulted the other in Stockholm in August this year.

But Assange said the Swedish women who have accused him of sexual assault had got into a "tizzy" about the possibility they had caught a sexually transmitted disease from him.

He insisted he was fighting a Swedish extradition warrant because he believes "no natural justice" would occur in Sweden. "I don't need to go back to Sweden," Assange told the BBC.

"The law says I... have certain rights, and these rights mean that I do not need to speak to random prosecutors around the world who simply want to have a chat, and won't do it in any other standard way."

He said the Swedish authorities had asked, as part of their extradition application, that he and his Swedish lawyer be gagged from speaking about the case.

"What is requested is that I be taken by force to Sweden and once there, be held incommunicado: That is not a circumstance under which natural justice can occur," he said.

Assange also said it was possible that the allegations against him arose from the two women going to the police for advice rather than to make a complaint.

He said "one description" of what had occurred was that after having discovered they had each been sexually involved with him, they had got into a "tizzy" about the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases, had gone to the police for advice "and then the police jumped in on this and bamboozled the women".

But he also said there were "other people making descriptions" that the women had deliberately abused a loophole in Swedish law, whereby if they went to the police for advice, they could not be charged with filing a false report.

The same loophole also existed for approaching the police about sexually transmitted diseases, Assange claimed.

Wikileaks has leaked thousands of secret US diplomatic cables -- a move that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said was "sabotaging peaceful relations" between countries.

But Assange insisted his mission was "to promote justice through the method of transparency".

"The world has a lot of problems that need to be reformed - and we only live once," he said.