Thai police say Pirate Bay co-founder to be extradited within a month

[November 05, 2014]  BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai police said on Wednesday the co-founder of the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, who was arrested this week at the Laos border, would be extradited to Sweden to serve a jail term within the next month.

Fredrik Neij, 36, is being questioned in the capital Bangkok after he was detained on Wednesday at a checkpoint in the northeastern town of Nong Khai.

"A Swedish national was brought here today. He will be put in a detention room ... staff from the Swedish embassy will then interrogate him," Police Lieutenant Colonel Nuttavuth Sangduen, deputy superintendent of Nong Khai Immigration, told Reuters.

"It will take less than a month to extradite him."

Neij told reporters in Bangkok that his arrest was "expected" but did not offer any further explanation.

The Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, provided links to music and movie files that were stored on other users' computers. Swedish subsidiaries of prominent music and film companies had taken The Pirate Bay to court claiming damages for lost revenue.

Neij, who also goes by the alias "TiAmo", is the last of the website's founders to be detained after dodging a 2009 conviction for copyright violations along with three other site operators - Peter Sunde, Gottfried Warg and Carl Lundstrom.

The four men were each sentenced to one year in prison and fined millions of dollars.

Neij has been living in Laos since 2012 with his Laotian wife, police said. He owns a property on the Thai resort island of Phuket, has a Thai savings account and has entered Thailand nearly 30 times over the past two years.

Neij is the second of the website's founders detained in Southeast Asia. In 2012 Gottfrid Warg was arrested in Cambodia and was later deported to Sweden.

Last week Warg, also known by his hacker alias "Anakata", was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison by a Danish court for breaking into computers owned by technology services giant CSC.

(Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Juarawee Kittisilpa; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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