The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges.

Before Stockholm's chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits.

"It was 7am when a friend who is Swedish and has been out on the net told me about the allegations," Assange told Stockholm daily newspaper Aftonbladet, which has hired him as a columnist : "It was shocking. I have been accused of various things in recent years, but nothing so serious as this."

He said none of his sexual relations had ever been built on anything other than totally consensual activity.

The preliminary allegation, made on Friday night, and not further investigated at that stage, was apparently leaked by police to a tabloid in Stockholm, which published dramatic claims on Saturday morning that Assange was to be arrested.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority todaysaid an "on-call" prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange late on Friday, only to see it revoked the next day by a higher-ranked prosecutor who found no grounds to suspect him of rape.

"The prosecutor who took over the case had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor," said Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the authority.

One of two women involved told Aftonbladet in an interview published today that she had never intended Assange to be charged with rape. She was quoted as saying: "It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him."

Speaking anonymously, she said each had had voluntary relations with Assange: "The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women."

Sources close to the woman said that issues arose during the relationships about Assange's willingness to use condoms.

In her interview, she dismissed the idea, seized on by many conspiracy theorists that 'dirty tricks' lay behind the rape allegations, because of WikiLeaks' defiance of the US government. She said: "The charges against Assange are of course not orchestrated by the Pentagon."

Swedish prosecutors said today that a decision would be taken early this week whether to continue investigations into lesser possible charges against the nomadic Assange, which he also denies.

Some of WikiLeaks' computer servers are currently based in Sweden, and he has sought to shelter under Sweden's journalistic source protection laws for the organisation's crusade to promote worldwide leaking of information. Assange and his co-activists at WikiLeaks have refused US defense department demands that they cease publishing thousands of leaked military documents about the US war in Afghanistan, and making accusations of murder of civilians.

US generals have accused WikiLeaks of wholesale leaking that does too little to protect informants and the identities of Afghan villagers who co-operated with US and British forces.

Assange has riposted that it is US soldiers who have "blood on their hands" and he is seeking to edit sensitive files before posting them online.

A former US army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, is in military custody at Quantico, Virginia, accused of turning over to outsiders a huge quantity of classified material which subsequently appeared on WikiLeaks. Bradley reportedly told fellow computer enthusiasts that he was horrified by what he found.