Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks. He is an Australian hacking activist, publisher, author, and performance artist. Born in Townsville, Queensland, Assange moved to Melbourne, Australia, with his mother in 1991. He attended Central Queensland University but dropped out after two terms to work for an internet service provider
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He launched WikiLeaks in 2006. In 2010 the organisation published more than 90,000 classified or otherwise secret documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the imprisonment of alleged members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, among others. In November 2010 WikiLeaks published a video that showed a US helicopter gunship attack on a Reuters journalist and Reuters staff in Baghdad that killed at least 12 people.
In December 2010 WikiLeaks released a set of over 90,000 documents from the US State Department taken from a private network used by diplomats in Iraq. This was followed by a second tranche of classified US diplomatic cables in late October 2011. After Assange's initial appeal was rejected by a Swedish court in 2010 he fled to Sweden where he had been living under asylum since August 2012.
The Metropolitan Police Service of London launched a European Arrest Warrant against him on behalf of US authorities for his role in publishing classified US material through WikiLeaks. In November 2010 Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange's failure to appear at a hearing regarding allegations that he had raped two women while he was out on bail in Sweden in 2010 after being accused of rape and sexual molestation by two women in Stockholm in 2010 on accusations made by one woman while he was out on bail on unrelated charges of rape and sexual molestation in Sweden. In February 2012 a Stockholm court ruled that Assange would be extradited to Sweden within weeks despite repeated denials from Sweden's government that it would extradite him on any charges.
An arrest warrant was issued for Assange when he failed to comply with the order to present himself before the court at 10:30am GMT (5:30am EST) on 5 February 2012 which was subsequently withdrawn after he presented himself at 10:38am GMT (5:38am EST). At 11:07am GMT (6:07am EDT) on 5 February 2012 British police officers entered his London embassy residence and arrested him without resistance and took him into custody at a central London police station where he was charged under section 7 of the British Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 with breaking his bail conditions by failing to surrender himself to custody when required by