Secret charges against Assange ‘revealed in cut and paste error’

SECRET criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may have been accidentally revealed in a “c u t-a n d-p a s te error” by US prosecutors.

He is wanted in America over the leak of classified military documents in 2010, but has spent more than six years sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was facing allegations of sex crimes in his native Sweden, but insisted he could not face the claims as he then would be extradited to the US over his Wikileaks activities.

It emerged overnight that a US prosecutor in Virginia had mentioned Mr Assange’s name twice in a document for an unrelated case, urging a judge to keep the charges “confidential” until he can be extradited.

The document, uncovered by a US academic, says the charges “would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition”.

The prosecutor highlights that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged”.

The apparent slip-up was in papers, dated August 22 this year, for the case of Seitu Sulayman Kokayi, who is accused of sex crimes and has no ties to Mr Assange. There is no mention of what charges Mr Assange, below, may be facing. He has been sought by the US authorities since whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed classified Pe n t a g o n a n d S t a t e D e p a r t me n t documents in 2010. Wikileaks published the papers, with thousands of internal messages on the Iraq war.

Wikileaks today said the revelation of “secret charges” came through an “apparent cut-and-paste error in an unrelated case”. A spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Virginia said: “The court filing was made in error... that was not the intended name for this filing.”

University terrorism expert Seamus Hughes, who discovered the court documents, said he thought the Virginia prosecutor “just appears to have had Assange on the mind when filing motions to seal and used his name.”