One of the founders of Pirate Bay website has been detained by police in Sweden without being charged, according to several news sources.

Could Julian Assange be next?

A notorious file-sharing web site, Pirate Bay was shut down for most of the day on Monday after Swedish police reportedly raided PRQ, the server for Pirate Bay, and seized four of its servers in Stockholm, according to Forbes Magazine. The free-speech web server is also famous for hosting other, infamous web sites, including at times Wikileaks, the web site founded by Assange.

According to The Guardian newspaper in London, "Gottfrid Svartholm is the founder of the file-sharing Pirate Bay website who has been prosecuted by the Swedish government for enabling copyright infringements. At the behest of Sweden, he was recently arrested in Cambodia and then deported to Stockholm, where he has now also been accused (though not charged) with participating in the hacking of a Swedish company."

The Associated Press reported early last month that "Svartholm Warg and the site's three other founders were convicted in 2009 by a Swedish court of assisting copyright infringement by helping millions of the site's users illegally download music, movies and computer games. All were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures."

Such actions by the Swedish government might explain why Julian Assange sought asylum in Equador's embassy in England in order to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where Assange faces questioning for alleged sex crimes.

On Monday, Assange was accused of blocking access to several popular Swedish websites. Specifically, the news service AFP reported Monday, "Internet attacks blocked access to several popular Swedish websites for part of Monday, local police said, linking the outage to the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange."

"Every time something happens in the Assange affair there are more attacks on the internet in Sweden," a national police computer expert, Anders Ahlqvist, told AFP.