Interpol Hunting WikiLeaks Founder

What a coincidence. WikiLeaks releases embarrassing information exposing the United States and many other countries and the Interpol issues a Red Notice for Julian Assange, the founder of the site. He’s now being hunted down for alleged “sexual offences”:

LYON, France – INTERPOL has made public the Red Notice, or international wanted persons alert, for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the request of Swedish authorities who want to question him in connection with a number of sexual offences.

The Red Notice for the 39-year-old Australian, which was issued to law enforcement in all 188 INTERPOL member countries on 20 November, has now been made publicly available by INTERPOL following official authorization by Sweden.

All INTERPOL National Central Bureaus (NCBs) have also been advised to ensure that their border control agencies are made aware of Assange’s Red Notice status, which is a request for any country to identify or locate an individual with a view to their provisional arrest and extradition.

Many of INTERPOL’s member countries however, consider a Red Notice a valid request for provisional arrest, especially if they are linked to the requesting country via a bilateral extradition treaty. In cases where arrests are made based on a Red Notice, these are made by national police officials in INTERPOL member countries.

INTERPOL cannot demand that any member country arrests the subject of a Red Notice. Any individual wanted for arrest should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The Interpol warrant comes at the request of Swedish prosecutors in relation to rape allegations made by two women, coincidentally after the exposé of the Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries. Apparently, they haven’t read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Assange is now rumoured to be in a secret location outside London, along with other WikiLeaks people, after declaring that Hillary Clinton “should resign” for ordering the espionage in the United Nations.

It all sounds like a movie script in the making, with a guy airing the United States and friends’ dirty laundry and people in dark offices stumping around, punching tables and screaming “I WANT HIS HEAD!” until they nail him. My bet is that the Interpol will not get Assange and he will get a tasty Polonium cocktail instead. [The Guardian]