Julian Assange

London, Dec. 19: A 68-page confidential Swedish police report that sheds new light on allegations of sexual misconduct on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been leaked.

The Swedish report traces events over a four-day period in August when Assange, a 39-year-old Australian who was released from a British jail late last week, 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 the women’s 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.

The case has prompted widespread controversy, with supporters of Assange alleging that he is the victim, and the women are complicit in a vendetta seeking to punish WikiLeaks for posting hundreds of thousands of secret American documents on the Internet.

The conspiracy, supporters of Assange have said, hinges on what they have described as an improbable co-incidence: that he is facing potential criminal charges in a sex case just as he is challenging the US government.

These critics have also pointed to possible political manipulation of the Swedish prosecutor’s office, which had dropped the most serious allegations against Assange but later revived them, listing the allegations that prosecutors wished to question him on as “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion”.

But details in the police report and dozens of interviews with people in Sweden linked to the case suggest that the Swedish case could be less flawed than Assange’s supporters have claimed.

As for the prosecutors’ actions, interviews with legal experts suggest that it would not be abnormal for such a high-level case to move up the hierarchy of prosecutors, with disagreements over how to apply Sweden’s finely calibrated laws on sexual misconduct.