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A Swedish court ruled on Wednesday after a public hearing to uphold the arrest warrant for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who had stayed in Ecuador's embassy in London for two years to avoid extradition over allegations of rape and sexual molestation.
Judge Lena Egelin said that Assange is still suspected, with probable cause, of sex crimes, and therefore, his detention order remains in place.
The judge also said that the decision could be appealed.
After the ruling, Assange's lawyers made it clear that they would appeal Wednesday's court verdict.
In August 2010, the two young women Assange met and slept with in Stockholm later accused him of rape and sexual assault.
Assange said the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing", during the time when he feared that U.S. authorities' backlash over the leak of hundreds of thousands of military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies across the globe. "The fear here was not about Sweden but that Sweden was going to be a place that would extradite him to the U.S.," Assange's U.S. lawyer Michael Ratner told The Guardian earlier.
"Until we can get an assurance from the U.S. government of non-prosecution, leaving the Ecuadorean embassy would be a very high risk move," said Ratner.
Stockholm District Court held the public hearing on Wednesday to determine if the arrest warrant for Assange for alleged sexual assault should be dropped.
This is the first formal legal discussion of the case since Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London two years ago.
