JULIAN Assange has received a glimmer of hope in his battle against sexual abuse allegations, as hackers around the world stepped up cyberattacks in support of WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks founder may be released from jail next week unless Swedish prosecutors produce evidence in London to back up their allegations.



Britain's senior district judge Howard Riddle said Swedish authorities would need to show some convincing evidence if they wanted to oppose bail for the 39-year-old Australian when he appears in court next Tuesday to oppose extradition to Sweden.

It emerged Wednesday that high-profile human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson will represent Assange in his fight against extradition from Britain to Sweden.



Robertson, a barrister who has dual British and Australian nationality, has appeared in some of the highest-profile freedom of speech trials in British history.



The allegations



The lawyer for Swedish authorities, Gemma Lindfield, told yesterday's initial extradition hearing that the first complainant, identified only as Miss A, said she was victim of "unlawful coercion" on the night of August 14 this year in Stockholm.



The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.



The second allegation says Assange "sexually molested" Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.



The third claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on August 18 "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity".



The fourth accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.

Sweden has the highest number of rapes in the European Union, the New York Times reports, which is most likely related to the country's broad legal definition of rape and a higher rate of reported crimes.

Two of the women making allegations about Assange are "the victims of a crime, but they are looked upon as the perpetrators and that is very unfortunate," their lawyer, Claes Borgström, told The Guardian.

Ms Lindfield told the court yesterday that she believed the strength of the evidence over the sex charges was not relevant to the process of extraditing Assange under a European Arrest Warrant.



Judge Riddle disagreed, saying the four charges, including rape, were "extremely serious allegations (and) if they are false, he suffers a great injustice if he is remanded in custody".

US extradition?



Despite Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny's claims that Assange's arrest had "nothing to do with WikiLeaks", legal sources in London reportedly claim that US and Swedish officials have discussed the possibility of Assange being delivered to US custody after the whistleblowing website's release of classified US diplomatic cables.



There is "big fear... that if he is extradited they will send him to America and he will disappear," a source told the Sydney Morning Herald.



The Guardian law blogger Afua Hirsch speculates that Assange being extradited to the US is a real possibility, if the US specifies criminal charges and if Sweden doesn't take the legal option to object to a "political offence" extradition.



Possible US charges would include trafficking stolen government property, or others based on the country's espionage act. But that act was designed to target the source of leaks, not a media organisation, Hirsch writes.



And if Assange is indicted in the US, it is likely to be handed down by a grand jury and thus not made public.



If the US is unable to extradite Assange from Sweden, he may also be subject to extradition from other countries – including Australia.



Cyberattacks

Online vigilante group Anonymous has been running a campaign of cyberattacks in support of WikiLeaks by using illegal distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a site by flooding it with requests.

Members of Anonymous, in an online chat with AFP, vowed to attack anyone with an "anti-WikiLeaks agenda."

Anonymous - believed to be a loose coalition of global hackers - has launched cyberattacks on Mr Borgström, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Sarah Palin.



MasterCard and Visa websites were today taken offline by the group's attacks for their decision to suspend payments to WikiLeaks.

This morning (after 8am AEDT) Visa's main website went offline after Anonymous tweeted its plans: "WE ARE ATTACKING WWW.VISA.COM IN AN HOUR! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY".



An hour later, it tweeted: "Operation Payback. TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS"

Both Visa and MasterCard said their websites were experiencing higher than normal traffic but that this didn't affect card transactions. Visa's after-hours shares went down 0.6 per cent while its national sites, such as usa.visa.com and visa.co.uk weren't affected.

The Twitter account Anon_Operation has since been suspended, and the Facebook page of "Operation Payback" also went offline.

Asked to confirm the page had been removed, a Facebook spokesman told AFP the social network takes "action on content that we find or that's reported to us that promotes unlawful activity."

"Specifically, we're sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and threats of violence," the spokesman said.

Sarah Palin, an outspoken critic of Julian Assange, has also been subjected to cyberattacks this week.



Her fundraising website and her husband Todd's credit card information were targeted, the former Alaskan Governor told ABC News in the US.



"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics", Palin said in an email to ABC.



"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."



Assange is due to face court again next Tuesday.

- with AAP, AFP and NewsCore

Originally published as Jailed Assange's glimmer of hope