WikiLeaks Founder: Pentagon Behind Rape Claim

An AFP newswire article, via The Guardian, reports:

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."

More here.