STOCKHOLM: Sweden said Thursday it would issue a fresh arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as new revelations from his website's expose of US diplomatic cables saw Russia branded a "mafia state".
While the elusive whistleblower laid low, his British lawyer insisted police knew his whereabouts and it emerged that an initial warrant was defective.
After the Supreme Court in Stockholm refused to hear an appeal by Assange against the initial warrant over allegations of rape and molestation, Swedish police said they would issue a new one as a result of a procedural error.
"It's a procedural fault," Tommy Kangasvieri of the Swedish National Criminal Police told media. "The prosecutor Marianne Ny has to write a new one."
While Assange has not been seen in public since WikiLeaks began leaking around 250,000 cables on Sunday, his London-based lawyer Mark Stephens denied he was on the run.
"Scotland Yard know where he is, the security services from a number of countries know where he is," Stephens told media.
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