Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer
The police interrogator and one of the accusers in the Julian Assange case are friends, according to a new report out of Sweden. The interrogator and one of the two accusers had known each other for at least 16 months when rape allegations were raised against Assange, according to the newspaper Expressen.
Neither the interrogator nor the accuser is named in the Expressen report. But the Web site rixstep.com identifies the Stockholm interrogator as Irmeli Krans. Krans took the testimony of Sofia Wilen, but the interrogator is friends with Anna Ardin, the other Assange accuser. Krans and Ardin reportedly have both political and personal ties; the Expressen article describes them as "party friends."
Meanwhile, the hacker group Anonymous has launched a civil-disobedience campaign against the U.S. Federal Reserve and major financial institutions, which it says have damaged the global economy and mocked the rule of law.
Expressen says the interrogator played a pivotal role in prompting prosecutor Maria HÃ ¤ljebo Kjellstrand to order the arrest of Assange:
The female police officer had just started her shift at the Klara police station in central Stockholm when the two women showed up. It was on the afternoon of August 20. Just sixteen hours later Expressen's scoop of the arrest order against Julian Assange became worldwide news.
The female police soon realised that her friend and party colleague was one of the plaintiffs--yet she was still the first to interrogate one of the women in the case. At 16.21 she started the questioning of the other plaintiff, without reporting a conflict of interest that made her participation in the case challengeable.
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