Swedish prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson filed a formal request for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be detained in absentia over rape allegations.
“I request the district court to detain Assange in his absence, on probable cause suspected for rape,” Persson, Sweden’s deputy director of public prosecutions, said in a statement Monday morning.
“If the district court decides to detain him, I will then proceed by issuing a European arrest warrant which requests that he is to be extradited to Sweden,” Persson said.
The request was filed following the reopening of the rape investigation last week which had started in 2010 but dropped in 2017 following Assange’s asylum in Ecuador’s London Embassy.
Persson said that there was “still a probable cause to suspect that Assange committed rape” and that “a new questioning of Assange is required.”
Sweden is seeking the extradition of Assange. If the U.S. looks to have him extradited too, it will be up to British officials to decide which country gets him.
“I am well aware of the fact that an extradition process is ongoing in the U.K. and that he could be extradited to the U.S. In the event of a conflict between a European Arrest Warrant and a request for extradition from the U.S., U.K. authorities will decide on the order of priority. The outcome of this process is impossible to predict,” Persson said.
The statute of limitations on Assange’s rape case is set to end in August 2020.
Assange is serving a 50-week jail sentence in Britain after being found guilty of breaking bail conditions in 2012.
If extradited to the U.S., Assange would face charges that he tried to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010 with the help of Chelsea Manning.
