Julian Assange will be interviewed by Swedish police over claims he raped a woman in 2010.

But the WikiLeaks founder, 45, will not leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London because the authorities will visit him inside next Monday.

The Swedish assistant prosecutor, Chief Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren, and a Swedish police investigator have been allowed to be present at the interview. They will report the findings to Sweden.

Swedish authorities want to question Assange over allegations that he committed rape in 2010. Assange denies the allegations.

Julian Assange will be interviewed by Swedish police over claims he raped a woman in 2010

The 45-year-old Australian sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London in June 2012 after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden.

Event: Assange was speaking at a Wikileaks seminar in Sweden on August 14 2010, within four days he allegedly slept with two women who accused him of sex attacks

Assange fears that if he were sent to Sweden to face trial, he could be extradited to the United States to be tried over WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents and face a long prison sentence or the death penalty.

Authorities have said that the statute of limitations on the charges against Assange runs through 2020.

The scandal made headlines around the world, forcing the usually strident campaigner to go to ground in Stockholm, claiming it was a smear campaign, possibly initiated by the CIA or the Pentagon.

Assange, 45, was attending a seminar in Stockholm six years ago when he found himself facing charges of rape and sexual molestation.

He denies the alleged sex crimes but does not seem to be in dispute is that he had sex with the two women within four days.

His supporters pointed out that the allegations came just a few weeks after WikiLeaks became embroiled in a dispute with the Pentagon over its publication of classified war documents, which the U.S. says endangers the lives of its soldiers and their Afghan allies.

Sources in Sweden take a different view - they insist it was Assange’s louche behaviour and his chauvinistic attitude that led to the charges.

The anti-secrecy campaigner, who denies the allegation, walked into Ecuador's London embassy of his own free will four years ago, with Britain on the brink of sending him to Stockholm, and has not left since.

Earlier this year a Swedish district court maintained a European arrest warrant against Assange, rejecting his lawyers' request to have it lifted.

Path: George Clooney's lawyer wife Amal Alamuddin (left) leaving an extradition hearing with Julian Assange, who would later seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London

Ecuador in the past has said it does not want to interfere with Sweden's rape investigation.

Quito has said it would support Assange's transfer if Stockholm could provide guarantees that he would not be sent to the United States for prosecution over WikiLeaks' release of 500,000 secret military files.

Assange has compared living inside the embassy - which has no garden but is in the plush Knightsbridge district, near Harrods department store - to life on a space station.

His 15 feet by 13 feet (4.6 by 4 meter) room is divided into an office and a living area. He has a treadmill, shower, microwave and sun lamp and spends most of his day at his computer.

A UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on February 5 ruled in a non-binding decision that Assange's confinement in the Ecuadoran embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain.