New York:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange believes that the Pentagon could be behind the false rape charges that were filed against him on Friday by Swedish prosecutors and then withdrawn after a few hours.
"I don't know who's behind this but we have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us," Assange told Swedish daily Aftonbladet.
So far, Pentagon has not reacted to the charge. The website is set to publish 15,000 more secret papers about the war in Afghanistan in coming weeks, having recently released nearly 77,000 papers and sparking charges that it had endangered the lives of informants and others.
The information supported existing suspicions like Pakistan's ISI links with extremists and extra-judicial killings by US forces.
Assange has been asked by the Pentagon not to release another 15,000 documents, which has blasted him for endangering the lives of local informers in Afghanistan mentioned in the documents.
The 39-year-old former hacker from Australia has said that he still plans to release the documents. Soon after the charges emerged on Friday, Assange posted a message on twitter, denying these charges.
"The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing," said the twitter feed.
"We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one. Why these accusations are coming at this point in time is an interesting question. I haven't been contacted by the police. The allegations are false," he told Dagens Nyheter, another Swedish newspaper.
However, prosecutors in Sweden have said that they did not make a mistake when they issued an arrest warrant, even though it was withdrawn, according to Al Jazeera, but separate molestation charges are still underway and a decision will be made later this week.
"You can't call it a mistake," said Karin Rosander, from Sweden's prosecution authority, who noted that the decision had to be made on the information available at the moment.
"All investigations develop and yesterday the new prosecutor had than the first prosecutor. All investigations develop," she added, in response to a question about why the prosecutors did not wait until they were sure.
"Prosecutors have to make decisions very quickly sometimes on serious crimes." Assange told al-Jazeera that a "smear campaign" was being orchestrated.
"I have no idea," Rosander said in response to a question whether there was any veracity behind the smear campaign suspicions. She also noted that the Swedish authorities had not spoken with Assange and did not know where he is located.
Wikileaks and the Pentagon are locked in a bitter dispute over the Afghan papers, with US Defence Secretary Robert Gates calling the website "guilty" on moral grounds and Assange saying that the site would not be threatened.
The Pentagon has said it would not negotiate a "sanitised" release of the documents, as Wikileaks had suggested it might in order that US officials could help analyse the documents and avoid publishing the names of people whose lives could be threatened.