News blog

The US embassy cables

The arrest of Julian Assange: as it happened

Read today's live coverage of Wikileaks and Julian Assange

Matthew Weaver and Richard Adams

Tue 7 Dec 2010 09.06 GMT

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

8.47am: The WikiLeaks story continues to focus on the fate of Julian Assange as much as the contents of the leaked cables.

Assange was meeting his lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson this morning and is expected to meet police within hours. He will release a video statement later today.

Last night Robinson said: "We have a received an arrest warrant [related to claims in Sweden]. We are negotiating a meeting with police."

Our legal affairs correspondent Afua Hirsch explains how Assange's legal team will fight extradition.

Robert Booth reports on how the net has tightened around Assange since WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of classified cables.

Meanwhile, the US attorney general Eric Holder said his justice department was examining ways to stem the flow of leaked cables, as PayPal and a Swiss bank took action against WikiLeaks.

Here are the headlines on the latest leaked cables.

• Secret Nato plans to defend Baltics from Russia

• Burma general considered Manchester United buyout

• Poland wants missile shield to protect against Russia

• Sudan warned to block Iranian arms bound for Gaza

• US pressured UN climate chief to bar Iranian from job

• Algeria goes from security joke to US ally in Maghreb

You can follow all the previous disclosures and reaction on our other live blogs about the cables. And for full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.

9.19am: The Daily Mail's Richard Pendlebury travelled to Enkoping in Sweden to examine the alleged sexual assault case against Julian Assange. The Mail has been portraying Assange as a international Bond villain in recent days, and there are plenty of sordid details in Pendlebury's article. But it also examines "several puzzling flaws in the prosecution case".

He says Assange's supporters suspect US dirty tricks:

They argue that the whole squalid affair is a sexfalla, which translates loosely from the Swedish as a 'honeytrap'.

One thing is clear, though: Sweden's complex rape laws are central to the story.

Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews, we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange's liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for "spying".

https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates?CMP=twt_gu