Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has today begun his fight against extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault.
The leader of the whistle-blowing website, which hit the headlines late last year after publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables, has been held under house arrest in the UK after being bailed at an earlier hearing in London.
Assange denies assaulting two women in Sweden, claiming the charges are a backlash from the revelations made in the leaked cables.
Lawyers are fighting the extradition to Sweden on the ground that it may then send Assange to the US, where he is regarded as a potential terrorist threat, the BBC reports.
They also argue the extradition would breach Assange’s human rights the news site said.
Separately, the Anonymous ‘hacktivist’ group last week began targeting sites in Egypt, following anti-government riots in the country.
Anonymous mounted a series of distributed denial of service attacks on firms including Amazon, MasterCard and Visa after the firms withdrew support for Wikileaks in the wake of the cable row.