Though the English-speaking world had lost interest in the details of the accusations against him, furious debate had continued in the country where Assange would be questioned and possibly charged. Much of this was due to the argument Assange's legal team had mounted against extradition - that Sweden's politically appointed judges, in-camera sex crime trials and freewheeling prosecutors were at variance with EU standards, and neither process nor eventual trial was fair.
That line of argument hasn't gone down well in Sweden, where many people are getting tetchy about the country's reputation as an authoritarian madhouse. Yet by mid-year, the case was increasingly in question.
Anna Ardin, one of the complainants, had added an accusation of physical sexual coercion, though she had earlier told a newspaper that Assange was ''not violent''. Tweets indicating a continued relationship with Assange vanished from the record, and were retrieved by bloggers; a leaked police file had a witness recalling one complainant saying she had been railroaded into making an accusation by the police and others.
When the leaked police report went into wider circulation, it did not take long for people to notice that the name of
the initial investigating officer, Irmeli Krans, was familiar from somewhere else. In fact she was one of the links listed on the blogroll of Anna Ardin, the first complainant and organiser of Assange's visit to Sweden in August last year. That was unusual, though of itself not impossible - Stockholm is, in many ways, a small town. But the links rapidly proved beyond coincidence, many of them unearthed by Sweden's libertarian Flashback mega-blog.
Krans and Ardin were not merely connected online, they were both members of the Social Democratic Party and had run together as candidates for the city council elections some months before. Connected through gay and lesbian networks in the party, Krans had visited Club Febber, the fetish nightclub that Ardin set up on Gotland, a residential island off the Swedish coast. Ardin had also commented on Krans's blog a year earlier, on a post about racism and sexism, criticising ''women who claim they're not oppressed and therefore think it's OK to trash feminists''. Responding to the post, Krans noted: ''Usually I only get negative posts on this blog … but this post puts its finger on the matter, and speaks for itself.'' ''Thanks for the props,'' Ardin replied. ''The cultural elite often think it is OK to be a little racist and sexist.''
Were such connections sufficient for Krans to recuse herself from the case? There is no record that she raised the matter. Instead, immediately after Ardin and the other complainant, Sofia Wilen, walked into a central Stockholm police station on August 20 last year, Krans conducted an interview with Wilen.
Contrary to police guidelines, the interview was neither taped nor transcribed. A half-hour into the interview, police had already consulted the prosecutor's office, and a rape investigation was opened. Krans was almost immediately removed from the case, but a leaked email reveals she subsequently queried whether rape charges had been laid.
Two days later she attempted to access the interview file on the police computer but was refused access. A leaked email exchange between Krans and her superior indicates that she was attempting to revise the summary of Wilen's statement, because she had taken it down incompletely at the time.
By the most generous assessment, the initial handling of the case was a mess. An internal police inquiry would later find that Krans's conduct had not affected the case - even though Krans, a potential witness in any future trial, had subsequently broadcast an extraordinary stream of anti-Assange commentary on her Facebook page and over Twitter, complaining that the official accusation of ''minor rape'' was insufficient, and cheering on Claes Borgstrom, the complainants' lawyer.
Her Facebook account shows Harald Ullman, a member of the Stockholm police board, logged on to express his disbelief at her conduct. Krans's involvement in the interview with Wilen has certainly complicated its status as evidence - all the more so, since Wilen never verified it as a true record with her signature.
Yet there were also problems with the allegations against Assange by Anna Ardin herself. During her interview,
conducted by phone - also against police guidelines on sex crime cases - the day after Wilen's interview, Ardin had given an account of her encounter with Assange, from which two misdemeanour ''annoyance'' charges were made. That day, the senior prosecutor quashed the rape investigation commenced the day before during Wilen's interview. Two days later, Claes Borgstrom had become both women's lawyer, and appealed the decision not to prosecute. Two days after that, on August 25, Ardin handed over to police a condom that she claimed had been the one used during her encounter with Assange 10 days earlier. As with everything in this case, the forensic report on this item eventually leaked. For a condom allegedly used in a sex act, it had little to give up, the lab report telling the investigation that no DNA had been recovered from it in an initial series of tests, though they did not rule out the possibility that some might be found. The police had also requested one other test, to see if the rip at the top of the condom was a tear or a blade cut. The delay in securing a potentially vital piece of evidence remained unexplained, as did the process by which Ardin's accusation changed from a misdemeanour crime of annoyance to a felony, sexual coercion.
The question as to why Ardin would have kept a torn condom for a week when she had no initial intention of going to the police also remained unanswered.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/moment-of-truth-20111001-1l2lt.html
Sweden has this law whereby even consensual sex, without a condom, is classed as rape