Lawyer says will fight WikiLeaks chief's extraditionLONDON: Julian Assange's legal options narrowed Thursday as the WikiLeaks founder lost an appeal against a court order for his arrest and his British lawyer said authorities knew his precise location. Sweden's Supreme Court upheld a order to detain the 39-year-old Australian for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual molestation that could lead to his extradition. The WikiLeaks founder has been out of the public eye for nearly a month, although Assange's London-based attorney Mark Stephens insisted that authorities knew how to find him. “Both the British and the Swedish authorities know how to contact him, and the security services know exactly where he is,” Stephens said. “The (British) police are being slightly foxy in their answers, but they know exactly how to get in touch with him, as do the Swedish prosecutors.” Britain's Times newspaper said that Assange was at a location in southeast England although there was no confirmation from Stephens. After former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the WikiLeaks team should be treated like a terrorist organization, a spokesman for the website said Assange feared for his life. “When you have people calling, for example, for his assassination, it is best to keep a low profile,” Kristinn Hrafnsson said, after right-wing US websites and pundits called for him to be assassinated. Assange's mother also expressed fear for her son's safety. “I'm concerned it's gotten too big and the forces that he's challenging are too big,” Christine Assange told the Courier Mail, her local newspaper in Queensland, Australia. Assange's Stockholm-based lawyer Bjoern Hurtig said he would fight his client's extradition to Sweden in the event of his arrest. WikiLeaks was thrown off its web host Amazon, best known as a book retailer. After several hours, WikiLeaks was again accessible in the United States via a European server. Meanwhile, cables published to WikiLeaks' website detailed alleged financial support for North Korea and terrorist affiliates by Austrian banks; an allegation by a Pakistani official that Russia “fully supports” Iran's nuclear program; and a deeply unflattering assessment of Turkmenistan's president. The latest batch of leaked documents included a frank assessment from the American envoy to Stockholm about Sweden's historic policy of nonalignment – a policy which the US Ambassador, Michael Woods, seemed to suggest was for public consumption only. A front page story in The Guardian alleged that one of the leaked cables showed British politicians trying to keep parliament in the dark over the storage of American cluster bombs on UK territory – despite an international ban on the weapons signed up to by British authorities. Britain's Foreign Office denied the charge.
