London, November 20 (RHC)-- Swedish prosecutors have dropped their rape case against Julian Assange, a cofounder of WikiLeaks.  Assange faced a rape charge stemming from 2010, but prosecutors decided that, while the Swedish complainant was -- in their words -- "credible," her memory of the night in question had faded and there was limited corroborative evidence available.

In 2010, being suspected of committing sexual offences in Sweden, Assange fled to the United Kingdom, eventually taking up residency in the Ecuadorian embassy where he remained from June 2012 until April this year.  He was granted political asylum and even Ecuadorean citizenship.   He was eventually dragged out of the embassy and placed under arrest on the orders of Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno.  

Assange's Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, said as far as he was aware British lawyers had not yet been able to contact Assange in jail to inform him of the Swedish decision.  "This is the end of Assange's association with the Swedish justice system," Samuelson said.  "But he is not happy with the way he's been treated.  He lost faith in the Swedish justice system years ago."

In 2017, the public prosecutor responsible for the case at that time discontinued the investigation after exhausting all possibilities to make progress. After Assange's removal from the embassy in April 2019, the case was reopened at the request of the counsel for the injured party in Sweden.

Assange still faces 18 charges in the United States, including allegations he conspired to break into a Pentagon computer and worked with former U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak hundreds of thousands of classified documents.