Swedish Court Confirms Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks Founder

LONDON — Sweden’s highest court refused on Thursday to allow Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization, to appeal a court order seeking his arrest to face questioning over alleged sex crimes, his lawyer and said.

In a telephone interview, Mark Stephens, Mr. Assange’s lawyer in Britain, said the ruling by the Stockholm court exhausted his client’s legal options in trying to overturn the arrest order in Sweden, where the offenses are alleged to have taken place. Thursday’s ruling came a day after Interpol, the global police body, said it had been circulating a so-called Red Notice seeking Mr. Assange’s arrest for almost two weeks. Reuters quoted Kerstin Norman, a Swedish High Court official, as saying the ruling meant that earlier warrants for Mr. Assange’s arrest were still in force.

In a statement issued from its headquarters in the French city of Lyon, Interpol said on Wednesday that it had issued its call on Nov. 20, two days after Swedish prosecutors won court approval for a warrant that Interpol could circulate, and that it had only now received Sweden’s authorization to make its action public.

Also on Wednesday, WikiLeaks accused Amazon.com of ending an agreement to host its Web site. Amazon hosts the sites of many companies and organizations as part of its Amazon Web Services program.

The whereabouts of Mr. Assange, 39, is unknown, but the sequence of recent events suggests that if he had wanted to flee Britain, his last known location, without being arrested, he might have had to do so within 48 hours of the Nov. 18 Swedish court ruling.

A report in the British newspaper, The Independent, on Thursday suggested that Scotland Yard’s Serious Organized Crime Agency knew the whereabouts of Mr. Assange. He is said to be in the south of England and Scotland Yard even has a telephone number for him, but they have declined to arrest him until they clarify technical difficulties with paperwork filed by the Swedish prosecutors, the report said.

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