London:
In a series of media appearances on Thursday and Friday WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange railed against what he called an "illegal" and "aggressive" investigation of him and his website by the United States and dismissed accusations of sexual misconduct in Sweden as "politically motivated".
Free on bail after nine days in prison in Britain, where he is fighting extradition to Sweden, Mr. Assange said a United States espionage indictment against him was imminent. In earlier comments, he and his supporters had called the Swedish extradition proceeding a "holding" action intended to keep him within the law's grasp while the United States completed its investigation.
Mr. Assange used his first hours out of Wandsworth Prison in London to start an apparent media campaign, giving interviews to the BBC, NBC, Britain's Sky News, Independent Television News as well as a group of newspaper reporters while standing outside a snow-covered Ellingham Hall, the lavish country estate in eastern England to which a judge ruled he will be effectively confined as a condition of his $315,000 bail.
Wearing a green winter jacket, he told NBC he is enjoying being "out in the sun and out in the snow" after what he has called "solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison," but that "this is not the beginning of the end," of his legal travails, "but the end of the beginning."
He told Sky News, "We heard reports yesterday that a secret indictment has been made against me in the United States," speaking of assertions his lawyers had made in recent days that the United States would act soon to prosecute Mr. Assange over continued releases of classified American documents this year. The American attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., has said that an investigation into WikiLeaks is under way, but officials have declined to comment on its progress.
In several of the interviews Mr. Assange denounced the Swedish accusations, which centre on claims of sexual misconduct against two women in Stockholm this summer, as a "smear campaign," and complained to the BBC that his name had been unfairly leaked to a Swedish tabloid newspaper, Expressen.
He told the BBC that he suspects "a number of different interests, personal, domestic and international," of being behind the campaign. He also implied that the European arrest warrant a prosecutor there issued last week, to bring him back to Sweden for questioning, might be related to "onward extradition to the United States."
The Swedish prosecutors' office, a lawyer for the women and the women themselves have denied any political aspect to the case. Lawyers for the Swedish government have also repeatedly urged British judges to separate WikiLeaks from the sexual misconduct accusations against Mr. Assange.
Mr. Assange, sounding determined, often speaking loudly over interviewers who tried to interrupt or divert him, told cameras that leaks, including those from a trove of 250,000 American diplomatic cables, would be undiminished by his travails. And, with his release, he told the BBC, the releases would "proceed in a faster manner."
Ellingham Hall, owned by Vaughan Smith, the wealthy founder of a club for journalists in London, will be the base for those operations at least until the next hearing in British court Jan. 11. After arriving there last night, by armored Land Rover, Mr. Assange was, he said, fitted with an "Orwellian" electronic tag that under the conditions of his bail, confines him to a small area around Ellingham Hall. Mr. Assange, the court heard yesterday, must also meet daily with the police and abide by a strict curfew, an arrangement that he described as, "high-tech house arrest."