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Lawyer: Assange has half of cash needed for bail

A lawyer for Julian Assange said on Wednesday that the WikiLeaks founder's backers had raised around half of the cash he needs to secure bail in his Swedish sex crimes case.
Image: Julian Assange
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is pictured through the heavily tinted windows of a police vehicle as he arrives at a court in London on Tuesday.Carl Court / AFP - Getty Images
/ Source: msnbc.com news services

A lawyer for Julian Assange said on Wednesday that the WikiLeaks founder's backers had raised around half of the 200,000 pounds ($317,400) cash he needs to secure bail in the Swedish sex crimes case against him.

Lawyer Mark Stephens said members of the public had asked to contribute to the fund to release the Australian, who has outraged U.S. authorities by orchestrating the release of thousands of secret diplomatic cables.

Assange was in a London jail after Swedish authorities appealed against a judge's decision to free him on bail. Assange denies any wrong-doing.

Officials said an appeal against a judge's decision to grant him bail will be heard on Thursday at the High Court in London.

"We have to come up with 200,000 pounds in pound notes and that is difficult to come by," Stephens told BBC News.

"We've got about half of that right now but of course people will understand that even wealthy people don't keep that kind of money knocking around," he added.

Assange is fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct made by two female WikiLeaks volunteers, which he denies.

Prominent public figures including U.S. filmmaker Michael Moore, Australian journalist John Pilger and British author Hanif Kureishi have pledged their support for Assange.

"I'm getting offers from the general public who are coming in and saying, 'we really would like to contribute to this, Julian Assange shouldn't be in jail'," Stephens added.

'Significant flight risk'
"Why is it that Swedish authorities are so dead set that Julian Assange spends Christmas in jail? Do they have the genes of Scrooge?" Stephens said, referring to a cold-hearted character from Charles Dickens's novel "A Christmas Carol."

The conditions of Assange's bail say he must stay at a country house in eastern England owned by a supporter, report to police daily and wear an electronic tag.

The court has asked for a further 40,000 pounds ($62,900) in guarantees which would have to be paid were he to disappear.

However, the Swedish authorities fear he could flee justice.

"He remains a significant flight risk and no conditions that the court can impose could prevent his flight," prosecution lawyer Gemma Lindfield, representing the Swedish authorities, told the court hearing on Tuesday.

The website of the Swedish prosecutors' office, which was behind Assange's arrest in London, again came under cyberattack during the night and was out of action for around 12 hours, spokeswoman Karin Rosander said.

The site was targeted last week along with organizations such as Visa and MasterCard that Internet activists believe have obstructed WikiLeaks.

Hackers say they are tweaking the software used for those assaults in a bid to create more powerful tools for possible future protests.

Several programmers posted their versions of the attack program, known as Low Orbit Ion Cannon or LOIC, on Geeknet Inc's SourceForge.net website.

Users can download the software for free, and also post suggestions to developers on how to improve it.

"I improved this software to make a better weapon of it," a developer working on the project, who goes by the screen name ChipForkAnon, told Reuters in an e-mail.