London:
WikiLeaks website run by Julian Assange has threatened to take legal action against
The Guardian, which published its leaked war logs and secret US government cables.
According to a report in
The Sunday Times, the libel threat relates to a book written by two of the newspaper's senior reporters and reflects the level of acrimony that exists between Assange and his former collaborators.
The book is among a string of publications about Assange, including his own memoirs and an expose which will be released this week by a former colleague and friend at WikiLeaks.
According to the report, the Guardian book claims that Assange believed that informants who were potentially identified by his leaks "deserve to be killed".
The 39-year-old Australian will appear in court in London on Sunday to fight extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over rape allegations by two women, which he denies.
He is depicted in the book as an ill-tempered control freak with poor hygiene who threatened to sue whenever he did not get his own way.
Last week, the WikiLeaks Twitter account, believed to be personally authored by Assange, posted a message which said: "
The Guardian book serialisation contains malicious libels. We will be taking action."
According to the report, in a separate development, the significance of Assange's leaked documents has been questioned by
The New York Times, which collaborated in their publication with
The Guardian - along with
Le Monde in France and
Der Spiegel in Germany.
The American newspaper disputes
The Guardian's front page claims that the Afghan war logs showed coalition forces killed "hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents."
Last week it released a book by Bill Keller, its executive editor, which suggested that the real death toll was much lower but had been inflated by
The Guardian to underscore "the cost of what the paper called a 'failing war'."
However,
The Guardian stood by its interpretation of the casualties.
"Those many, many deaths that took place in ones, in twos, were some of the most harrowing incidents of the war and deserved to be written up in suitable detail. That's why we gave them more prominence than
The New York Times did," said David Leigh, the reporter who filed the disputed story in July last year and who is a co-author of
The Guardian's WikiLeaks book.
A spokeswoman for Guardian News & Media confirmed that the newspaper group was aware of the legal threat issued by WikiLeaks, but she said no official notification of action had been received.
"The irony of an organisation dedicated to the free and open flow of information threatening to sue a newspaper will be lost on no one," she said.