Swedish prosecutors drop rape probe against Assange

Stockholm: Swedish prosecutors on Friday dropped a seven-year rape investigation targeting Julian Assange, a legal victory for the WikiLeaks founder who has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012.

But British police said they would still arrest Assange if he tried to leave the embassy, saying he had breached the terms of his bail by refusing to turn himself in when an arrest warrant was issued in 2012.

Friday was the deadline for the Swedish public prosecutor’s office to either renew the pan-European arrest warrant or lift it.

Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecution, said in a statement that the rape investigation was dropped because "there is no reason to believe that the decision to surrender him to Sweden can be executed in the foreseeable future."

"In view of the fact that all prospects of pursuing the investigation under present circumstances are exhausted, it appears that it is no longer proportionate to maintain the arrest of Julian Assange in his absence," she added.

Shortly after the announcement, Assange posted on Twitter a picture of himself smiling broadly, without comment.

A lawyer on Assange’s legal team, Per Samuelsson, told Swedish radio the decision was "a total victory", saying that Assange was "of course happy and relieved".

Samuelsson also said that the decision meant Assange "is free to leave the embassy whenever he wants", though he later told the TT news agency that he did not know when Assange might leave. "What I do know is that Sweden does not stop him from doing it. Sweden is out of the game," he said.

Another lawyer, Christophe Marchand, told AFP that "We have been waiting a long time for this decision".

"Julian Assange has been a victim of a huge abuse of procedure. We are very pleased and very moved, as this marks the end of his nightmare."

The accusation against Assange dated from August 2010 when the alleged victim, who says she met him at a WikiLeaks conference in Stockholm a few days earlier, filed a complaint.

She accused him of having s.. with her as she slept without using a c....m despite repeatedly having denied him unprotected interc....e.

The 45-year-old Australian has always denied the allegations, which he feared would see him extradited to the United States and put on trial over the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents.

In November, Swedish prosecutor Ingrid Isgren was present during Assange’s questioning at the Ecuadorian embassy as she posed questions through an Ecuadorian prosecutor.

Swedish prosecutors received a translation of the interrogation four months later, but "all materials were translated into Spanish then into English then back into Spanish then into Swedish," Ny said, making it difficult for the investigation to move forward.

On Friday, Assange’s accuser called the prosecutor’s decision a "scandal", her lawyer said Friday.