Court documents suggest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been charged in secret

Julian Assange, the founder of website Wikileaks, may have been criminally charged in secret, according to an apparent mistake in court documents filed in the US.

Suggested by Wikileaks to be a "cut and paste" error, Assange's surname appeared in a filing submitted by US authorities in an unrelated case.

A section of the filing mentioned the need to keep criminal charges against Assange as confidential, despite no person in the case at hand having any apparent connection to the Wikileaks founder.

The papers, filed in Virginia by US attorney Kellen Dwyer, read:

"Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."

The rest of the filing pertains to a case against Seitu Sulayman Kokayi, a 29-year-old man charged with coercing and enticing a 15-year-old girl with "a substantial interest in terrorist acts".

A spokesperson for the prosecutors' office which filed the document told Reuters: "The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing."

Assange has been living within the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, seeking asylum as he evaded since-dropped charges of sexual assault. He has remained within the embassy over fears he may be extradited to the US, where Wikileaks is being investigated as part of the inquiry by Robert Mueller into Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential election.

One of Assange's lawyers, Barry Pollack, told the Guardian it was a "dangerous path for a democracy to take" for a government to bring criminal charges against someone for publishing what he believed to be truthful information.

"The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed," he wrote in an email.