Associated Press
DECEMBER 7, 2010, 6:00 A.M. ET
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London on Tuesday after surrendering to police as part of a sex-offenses investigation.
Mr. Assange handed himself in to British police on a warrant issued by Sweden in connection with accusations of rape and sexual molestation. He is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court later in the day.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London Tuesday.
"Julian Assange ... was arrested on a European arrest warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9:30 [a.m.] today," the Metropolitan Police Service said in a statement. "He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010."
Earlier, lawyer Mark Stephens said that Mr. Assange, who had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables to the web last week, planned to meet with officers from London's Scotland Yard.
The Internet-based organization's room for maneuver is narrowing by the day. It's been battered by web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and been subjected to a barrage of muscular rhetoric out of the U.S.
In anoter new development, Swiss authorities closed Mr. Assange's bank account, depriving him of a key fund-raising tool. Mastercard has also pulled the plug on payments to the site, according to technology news website CNET. A European representative for the credit-card company didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.
The attacks appeared to have been at least partially successful in stanching the flow of secrets—WikiLeaks hasn't published any new cables to the Internet in more than 24 hours, although stories about the cables have continued to appear in the New York Times and The Guardian, two of the papers given advance access to all 250,000 documents.
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