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Assange case officer ‘friend’ of accuser: report

The lead police interrogator in the case of suspected rape involving Julian Assange has personal and political connections to one of the two WikiLeaks founder's accusers.

Published: 10 March 2011 09:26 CET
Assange case officer 'friend' of accuser: report

According to the Expressen daily the two women know each other through their membership and involvement in the same political party and since the reported sex offence have exchanged messages on the internet and have been open about their friendship on their respective blogs.

They are also friends on Facebook, the newspaper reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, the interrogator, despite having taken part in the investigation, has written strongly worded negative comments about Julian Assange on her Facebook page.

In a status update at the end of February, she is reported to have written described Assange as an “over-hyped ready-to-burst bubble”.

Expressen pointed out that the officer in question must have realised as soon as the two women came in to provide statements last August that one of them was her acquaintance and co-party member, but she had not removed herself from the case and had instead gone on to interrogate the second alleged victim.

Neither of the victims had reportedly wanted to press charges against Assange but had instead gone to the police to find out if they could force him to undergo an HIV test after he had unprotected sex with them, despite their explicit request he use a condom.

According to media reports, it was one of the police officers involved in the interrogations who deemed what they had been through amounted to rape in one case and sexual molestation in another and took the matter to a prosecutor.

It remained unclear Thursday if the friend of the alleged victim was the officer who reported the matter to the prosecutor.

The interrogator in question declined to answer the newspaper’s questions and referred inquiries into the Assange case to police spokeperson Ulf Göranzon, who denied knowledge of the friendship between the two women.

“As I have not myself be given any information, other than through hearsay, then I am not prepared to comment,” Ulf Göranzon told Expressen.

Assange’s Swedish attorney was shocked upon learning of the report.

“With this now coming to light, I think you can question the entire preliminary investigation,” he told the newspaper.

He added that the lead interrogator should have informed her superiors that she knew one of the accusers.

Hurtig also found it curious that the two women who brought the sex crime allegations against Assange chose the police station where one of their friends was based.

“There’s really no good reason why they would have gone there,” he said.

He added that he plans to speak with Assange later in the day on Thursday to discuss the matter.

The Local’s attempts to reach Hurtig for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful.

Assange was arrested in Britain on December 7th on an international warrant issued by a Swedish prosecutor who wanted to question him over four separate allegations of sexual assault made by the two women relating to incidents in August 2010.

A UK court ruled in favour of extraditing the Australian to Sweden on February 24th. Julian Assange meanwhile continues to fight his extradition and lodged an appeal against the decision on March 3rd.

During those proceedings, Assange’s lawyers blasted the Swedish judiciary and claimed the allegations were motivated by anger at WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Sweden must demand that Julian Assange go free

Given Sweden’s involvement in the Assange case, the government’s continued silence over his impending extradition to the US is indefensible, says David Crouch

Published: 17 June 2022 13:37 CEST
OPINION: Sweden must demand that Julian Assange go free

I have no personal fondness for Julian Assange. I cannot forgive him for not condemning the torrent of abuse and slander suffered by the two Swedish women who, in 2010, accused him of sexual assault. His treatment of them has been shameful. Assange has continued to protest his innocence and has not expressed any regret for what happened. 

But that was then and this is now. At stake is something much bigger than the fate of one man and two women. And the Swedish government bears a clear share of responsibility for the outcome. 

Sweden’s prosecutors dropped the sexual assault investigation against Assange in 2017. For more than three years, he has been held in a maximum security prison in London while he has fought extradition to the United States on espionage charges. In April, a British court finally approved the extradition and referred the matter to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. 

Today (June 17), Patel gave the green light for extradition; Assange has 14 days to appeal. 

Extradition would be a colossal blow against media freedom. Journalists would fear to investigate US military and surveillance operations around the world. Assange himself faces a lifetime in jail for publishing classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including evidence of war crimes. 

Many Swedish free speech organisations recognise this. “The information obtained thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks is of great public interest. In a democracy, whistleblowers must be protected, not taken to court to become pawns in a political game,” says the Swedish Journalists’ Association. A large number of press freedom and human right organisations have echoed these words, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Index on Censorship, to name but a few.

“Should Assange be extradited to the US, it could have serious consequences for investigative journalism,” says the Swedish branch of Reporters without Borders. “Through the indictment of Assange, the US is also sending a signal to all journalists who want to examine the actions of the US military and security services abroad, or US arms deals for that matter. This also applies to Swedish journalists.”

Last month, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, called on Patel not to extradite Assange, saying it would have “a chilling effect on media freedom”.  Anna Ardin, one of the women who brought the original accusations of sexual assault, describes the accusations against Assange for espionage as “helt galet” (completely crazy). 

Given Sweden’s involvement in the Assange case, the continued silence from Rosenbad, the seat of government offices in Stockholm, is indefensible. 

For the seven years in which Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he said consistently and repeatedly that he was prepared to face justice in Sweden, but feared extradition to the United States and therefore required a guarantee that this would not happen. His treatment in the UK is proof that his fears were justified. 

As early as September 2012, The Local quoted Amnesty International on this matter: “If the Swedish authorities are able to confirm publicly that Assange will not eventually find himself on a plane to the USA if he submits himself to the authority of the Swedish courts then this will … it will break the current impasse and second it will mean the women who have levelled accusations of sexual assault are not denied justice.”

And yet, throughout, Sweden’s Ministry of Justice kept quiet. Instead, the Swedish Prosecution Authority stated repeatedly: “Every extradition case is to be judged on its own individual merits. For that reason the Swedish government cannot provide a guarantee in advance that Julian Assange would not be subject to further extradition to the USA.”

In 2016, a United Nations panel decided that Sweden had violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It called on the Swedish authorities to end Assange’s “deprivation of liberty”, respect his freedom of movement and offer him compensation. Again, the government itself remained silent, although Sweden’s director-general for legal affairs said that it disagreed with the panel.

Freedom of speech is one of the four “fundamental laws” that make up the Swedish constitution. There can be no excuse now for Morgan Johansson, Justice Minister, not to speak out in defence of Assange’s role as a whistleblower and journalist. 

Imagine if Assange had revealed Russian war crimes in Ukraine and was being held in Moscow’s high security prison? Every Western leader would be up in arms. 

Assange’s wife Stella Moris has Swedish citizenship. Her life, and that of their two children, will be destroyed if her husband, their father, is sent to rot in a US jail.

At this point in time, when Sweden’s independence in global affairs is in doubt owing to pressure from Turkey over its application to join Nato, it is even more vital for the government to break its silence and help bring the persecution of Julian Assange to an end. 

David Crouch covered Julian Assange’s campaign in the Swedish courts for The Guardian newspaper and is among 1900 journalists to have signed a statement in his defence. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

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