WikiLeaks founder breaks cover in Brussels

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is at the centre of a US security scare, has emerged from hiding to say that he is not afraid of the Pentagon but that he has been advised by his lawyers to avoid travelling to the United States.

Assange (above) broke cover when he spoke at a seminar at the European parliament in Brussels about freedom of information. He told the Guardian: "Politically it would be a great error for them [the Pentagon] to act. I feel perfectly safe... but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period."

The Australian-born hacker, who started WikiLeaks as "an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see", has been sought by the US military authorities ever since a young US Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Baghdad last month and taken into military custody.

It is assumed Bradley leaked the footage of a US Apache helicopter crew gunning down innocent civilians in Baghdad in July 2007 - a piece of film that became known as 'Collateral Murder'.

Manning is also thought to the source of another film, as yet unshown on WikiLeaks, but expected to be posted soon - namely, footage of the American bomb attack on the village of Grania in Afghanistan in which 140 civilians died in May 2009.

But what is really exercising the Pentagon is not the embarrassment of these two pieces of film, but the allegation that Manning also sent WikiLeaks 260,000 sensitive US State Department cables concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Guardian reports, "The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington."

As a result, a US official has been quoted as saying of Assange: "We'd like to know where he is ­ we'd like his co-operation in this."

Hence the media reports that Assange is the subject of a Pentagon-run manhunt, with Daniel Ellsberg, the veteran whistle-blower who leaked incendiary material relating to the Vietnam war in the 1973, saying: "I would think that [Assange] is in some danger".

However, Ellsberg did say that Assange's notoriety might now provide him with "some degree of protection" - and that, indeed, is what Assange appears to be banking on.

In the meantime, Bradley Manning remains in US Army detention in Kuwait where he has been held for more than three weeks without charge.

Assange said WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had been refused  access to him. Manning has instead been assigned US military counsel. ·