STOCKHOLM – Swedish prosecutors defended their handling of a rape allegation against the founder of WikiLeaks, saying Sunday that they had made no mistakes in issuing an arrest warrant and withdrawing it less than a day later.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, 39, said the short-lived warrant had damaged his group nonetheless.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority said an “on-call” prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange late Friday, only to see it revoked the next day by a higher-ranked prosecutor, who found no grounds to suspect him of rape.

“The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor,” Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the authority, said Sunday.

She declined to specify what the new material was but said there was “absolutely nothing” that suggested errors had been made by either prosecutor.

Assange was in Sweden last week seeking legal protection for the webiste, which angered the Obama administration by publishing thousands of leaked documents about U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Australian remains under suspicion of a lesser crime of molestation, which would not lead to an arrest warrant. Molestation covers a wide range of offenses under Swedish law including inappropriate physical contact with another adult.

Assange called the allegations “without basis” in a Twitter posting and questioned the motives behind them in an interview with a Swedish newspaper.

“I don’t know who’s behind this, but we have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us,” he said in comments translated into Swedish. “I have also been warned about sex traps.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell on Sunday called Assange’s charges “absurd.”

Assange rejected the molestation accusation and said he has never — in Sweden or elsewhere — “had sex with anyone without the full consent of both parties.”