ACTIVISTS behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents have complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing a US attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.
Australian Julian Assange, a founder of Wikileaks, has claimed that a restaurant where the group met in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, came under surveillance last month and one of the group's volunteers was detained for 21 hours by police.
Mr Assange said he had been followed on a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen by two US agents. The group has riled governments by publishing documents leaked by whistleblowers.
Last week, it released the cockpit recording from a US Apache helicopter as it killed Iraqi civilians, including a Reuters photographer, in Baghdad in 2007.
Mr Assange claims surveillance has intensified as he and his colleagues prepare to put out their Afghan film. It is said to concern the so-called Granai massacre, when US aircraft dropped bombs on a suspected militant compound in Farah province on May 4 last year. Several children were among the dead.
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In messages on Twitter, the internet social networking site, Mr Assange complained of "covert following and hidden photography" by police and foreign intelligence services. There have been thinly veiled threats, he said, from "an apparent British intelligence agent" in a car park in Luxembourg.
"Computers were also seized," another member of Wikileaks said on Twitter, raising alarm among supporters with a subsequent post: "If anything happens to us, you know why . . . and you know who is responsible."
Their apprehension is perhaps understandable. The US defence establishment has made it clear that it would like to silence the site. In 2008, the Pentagon produced a report on how to undermine and neutralise Wikileaks. This, too, emerged on the website.
Mr Assange, who is believed to be 37, founded Wikileaks three years ago with a group of like-minded computer programmers, academics and activists. The site says it has had more scoops since then than The Washington Post in three decades and has become a clearing house for sensitive documents. It has exposed crimes from toxic dumping and tax evasion to extrajudicial murders in Kenya.
Mr Assange says the 38-minute Iraqi video broadcast by the group is evidence of "collateral murder" by US forces. It shows a group of Iraqi men being killed by gunfire from the helicopter. A helicopter then shoots at a van arriving to take the bodies away.
The film has been seen by millions and the website, which claims to exist on a shoestring budget, says it has received more than $160,000 in donations since its release last Monday.
Broadcasting such a film could expose Wikileaks to prosecution in the US but the organisation appears to have put itself beyond the reach of court injunctions by existing only in the digital sphere.