The swiftly withdrawn allegations against Assange came as the lanky former computer hacker was locked in a dispute with the Pentagon over the leaking of secret military documents on the Afghan war.

But the 39-year-old Australian had numerous shocking revelations ranging from Iraq to Iceland under his belt even before his master stroke on Afghanistan last month catapulted him into the global spotlight.

WikiLeaks published nearly 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan on July 23 and says it will publish another 15,000.

Despite a wave of criticism that he had endangered lives, Assange insists the publication was an important part of WikiLeaks goal to revolutionise journalism.

"We are creating a new standard for free press," he told AFP during a recent visit to Stockholm, adding that "by doing so, we are hoping to liberalise the press across the world."

Yet while Assange may have transformed into a champion of transparency, he divulges little about himself and will not even give his date of birth.

Assange, who is constantly on the move, bouncing from capital to capital and staying with supporters and friends of friends, says secrecy comes with the territory.

"We deal with organisations that do not follow the rules. We deal with intelligence agencies," he said.

What is known is that Assange was born sometime in 1971 on Magnetic Island in northeastern Australia and spent his early years living there on and off with his mother.

In interviews with Australian media, Assange has described his childhood as nomadic, saying in all he attended 37 different schools.

Living in Melbourne in the 1990s, Assange says as a teenager he discovered a new talent: hacking.

But his new interest did not go undetected and he was charged with 30 counts of computer crime, including allegedly hacking police and US military computers.

He admitted most of the charges and walked away with a fine.

After his brush with crime, Assange says he worked in a number of different fields, as a security consultant, a researcher in journalism and started his own IT company.

In Reykjavik at the beginning of March, Assange told AFP he had lived in Kenya for a long time.

He also co-authored a book about Melbourne's hacker culture containing details of a 1989 incident in which NASA computer monitors flashed the word "WANK", standing for the hacker group Worms Against Nuclear Killers, as the Atlantis space shuttle was about to be launched.

In 2006, WikiLeaks was born.

"It started as a collaboration between a dozen people from human rights, journalism and technology" backgrounds, he said.

"We have three goals: free the press, establish rights and wrongs through exposing abuses and create and preserve the historical record."

Since the Afghanistan documents were published, Assange has kept a low profile, chopping off his flowing silver locks.

He now refuses to provide a mobile phone number and says he suspects Australian authorities have frozen his bank account.

According to his entourage he felt threatened last time he passed through London at the beginning of August.

Iceland and Sweden, where he feels safest due to favourable legislation, are among his regular stopovers.

Reykjavik was the birthplace of Wikileaks' first global scoop, a graphic video of a US military Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007 that killed two Reuters employees and a number of other people.

According to The New Yorker, Assange himself decrypted the military video, something he told the magazine had been only "moderately difficult."

The Iraq leak and later the massive Afghanistan leak are part of WikiLeaks' professed aim to create a new form of journalism based on free access to documents rather than depending on often unreliable sources.

"People often ask us: do you check your sources? But we check documents. We call organisations, and we ask them: are these documents yours? ... And I think (we have) a much higher standard," he says.

The Pentagon has charged that by publishing the Afghanistan documents WikiLeaks is recklessly endangering the lives of soldiers and informants, while several rights groups have also called the publication irresponsible.

Assange meanwhile has called on critics to help check through the piles of documents for content that could put lives at risk so it can be removed.

"We take our publishing responsibility seriously," he insists, adding "we also take our impartiality and integrity as an institution that provides a public service seriously."

But in a lawyer's letter released Wednesday the Pentagon said "no deal", and again called on Wikileaks to release no further documents.

earlier related report
WikiLeaks founder points at Pentagon over rape claims
Stockholm (AFP) Aug 22, 2010 - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview published Sunday he believed the Pentagon could be behind a rape allegation against him that was swiftly dropped by Swedish authorities.

His comments came as prosecutors justified their treatment of the 39-year-old Australian, whose whistleblowing website is embroiled in a row with Washington over the publication of secret Afghan war documents.

The Aftonbladet newspaper quoted Assange as saying he did not know who was "hiding behind" the rape claim, which prompted prosecutors to issue a warrant for his arrest on Friday but which was cancelled the following day.

"But we have been warned that for instance the Pentagon will use dirty tricks to destroy us. I have furthermore been warned about set-up sex traps," he said, in a translation of comments published in Swedish.

The former computer hacker described the allegations as "shocking" and said he had "never, neither in Sweden nor in any other country, had sex with someone in a way which wasn't completely voluntary on both sides."

Assange told Aftonbladet -- for which he last week agreed to write a regular column -- that his enemies would still use the claims to damage WikiLeaks despite the lifting of the warrant.

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.

"I know from experience that WikiLeaks' enemies continue to trumpet things even after they have been denied," Assange said.

He refused to give more details about the two women whose claims sparked the furore, saying that it would impinge on their privacy.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said any allegation of dirty tricks was "absurd".

Sweden's prosecution service said Saturday that Assange was now "not suspected of rape" and was no longer wanted for questioning on the allegation, but added that an investigation into a separate molestation charge remained open.

He had been in Stockholm earlier this month giving a press conference on the upcoming release of the last batch of Afghanistan documents, but he generally remains on the move around the world staying with supporters.

He told Aftonbladet he was currently at a friend's summerhouse in northern Sweden.

As the furore over the arrest warrant grew, the Swedish prosecutor's office issued a statement on Sunday defending its actions.

It said that chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who was responsible for withdrawing the arrest warrant, had "more information available to decide on Saturday than the duty prosecutor on Friday evening".

"A decision regarding restrictive measures, such as this, must always be reevaluated in a preliminary inquiry," the statement added.

Prosecutor's office spokeswoman Karin Rosander told AFP late Saturday that the procedure followed was normal and would have been launched automatically by the duty prosecutor in serious cases such as rape.

Separately the duty prosecutor, Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand, said that she "did not regret her decision".

The two women who originally made the allegations did not make an official complaint and it was the police who took the decision to inform the prosecutor's office, she told Expressen newspaper, which broke the story of the charges.

"I received a report from the police which seemed to me to be sufficient to arrest him. On Friday evening I got a call from the police describing what the women said. The information I received was convincing enough for me to take my decision," Hljebo Kjellstrand was quoted as saying.

WikiLeaks and the Pentagon are locked in a bitter dispute over the Afghan papers, with US Defense 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.

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