Legal pressure builds on WikiLeaks founder

Sweden has said it would issue a fresh arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, while US senators unveiled a bill aimed at punishing him and his whistleblowing website.

Freshly released State Department cables confirmed US concerns about President Hamid Karzai and the pervasiveness of corruption in Afghanistan, where some 100,000 US troops are stationed to fight the Taliban.

In one cable, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry said Karzai may be "paranoid" as he often inquired about conspiracy theories in which the United States was said to be working to undermine him or to weaken Afghanistan or Pakistan.

After the Supreme Court in Stockholm refused to hear an appeal by Assange against the initial warrant over allegations of rape and molestation, Swedish police said they would issue a new one as a result of a procedural error.

"It's a procedural fault," Tommy Kangasvieri of the Swedish National Criminal Police told AFP. "The prosecutor Marianne Ny has to write a new one."

While Assange has not been seen in public since WikiLeaks began leaking around 250,000 cables on Sunday, his London-based lawyer Mark Stephens denied he was on the run.

"Scotland Yard know where he is, the security services from a number of countries know where he is," Stephens told AFP.

While the elusive whistleblower laid low, a group of US senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to publish the names of informants serving the US military and intelligence community.

The legislation, which would amend the US Espionage Act aimed at punishing the disclosure of secret information, could help to stop such leaks from happening again.

But American legal experts have said the path to prosecution is strewn with potential legal complications, including free speech protections under the First Amendment of the US constitution.

Britain's Guardian newspaper followed up on earlier WikiLeaks revelations by reporting Thursday that the CIA had asked US diplomats to gather information on Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other senior UN figures.

The United States came under fire after WikiLeaks documents released on Sunday showed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had asked American diplomats at the UN to seek intelligence about Ban.