GENEVA -- Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is considering applying for asylum in Switzerland because he fears for his safety, the Associated Press reported on Friday.

Julian Assange told reporters he was “still looking into the process” of requesting asylum, but was considering the Alpine country because “the Swiss have a history of fierce independence.”
In October, Sweden denied Assange's application for a residence permit. The 39-year-old Australian had sought to establish a base for WikiLeaks in Sweden to take advantage of its laws protecting whistle-blowers.
Assange was speaking Friday at the United Nations in Geneva after a meeting organized by the Iranian Elite Research Center, a UN-accredited group based in Tehran.
He urged the United States authorities on Thursday to probe human rights abuses by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He called on the U.S. to fully examine abuses and to halt its “aggressive investigation” into his whistle-blowing organization, Reuters reported.
Assange said WikiLeaks would release thousands of documents this year concerning not only the United States, but other countries including Russia and Lebanon.
It has made public nearly 500,000 classified U.S. files on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, drawing ire from the Pentagon. Some U.S. secret documents contained accounts of Iraqi forces torturing Iraqi prisoners and the failure of the U.S. military to investigate those instances.
“It is time the United States opened up instead of covering up,” Assange told a news conference in Geneva on the eve of an examination by the UN Human Rights Council of the overall U.S. record.
“The United States is in grave danger of losing its way,” said the Australian, who is moving from country to country to seek protection through their whistleblower laws.
U.S. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh dismissed the call Friday, saying information in the leaked files was already known to U.S. authorities and hundreds of investigations into suspected abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq had taken place.
Assange, a veteran computer hacker, established WikiLeaks in 2006 and it has obtained secret documents, stored them outside the reach of governments, then released them globally.
That has included 391,832 secret documents on the Iraqi war and some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
Assange has since been denounced by governments, and some of his own colleagues, for releasing Afghan documents that contained the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO forces, thereby theoretically placing the sources' lives at risk.
U.S. officials have said they are weighing Assange's actions under the 1917 Espionage Act and demanded that he return all government documents that he has and publish no new ones.
Photo: Julian Assange attends a meeting at the UN Office in Geneva on November 5, 2010. (Getty Images)