As Washington tried to calm new outbursts of anger from world leaders over the leaks, France-based Interpol said it had alerted all member states to arrest Julian Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on allegations of sex crimes.

Assange's mother said she did not want her son "hunted down", while his lawyer in London suggested the alert issued by the global police body could be linked to the "bellicose" US reactions over the dumping of the documents.

"This is a persecution and not a prosecution," his attorney Mark Stephens said.

US President Barack Obama's spokesman meanwhile labeled as "ridiculous" an assertion by Assange that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should resign if she was involved in asking US diplomats to gather intelligence at the United Nations.

In an online interview with Time magazine from an undisclosed location, Assange called on Clinton to resign "if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations" in violation of international agreements.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Assange's statements "are both ridiculous and absurd." Clinton, he said, has done nothing wrong, and US diplomats do not engage in spying.

State Department officials said Tuesday that secret instructions to American diplomats to gather sensitive personal information about foreign leaders originated from the US intelligence community but did not require diplomats to spy. Requests for DNA and biometric data on foreign officials were contained in leaked classified cables published by WikiLeaks.

Speaking from a London hide-out, Assange told Forbes magazine on Tuesday that a new haul of secret documents, about half of which relate to the private sector, would be released early next year. WikiLeaks' next target will be a major American bank, he said.

"It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms," he told Forbes, adding: "For this, there's only one similar example. It's like the Enron e-mails."

Assange also said he was sitting on a haul of damaging data on pharmaceutical, finance and energy companies.

He had information on a host of companies — from BP to an Albanian oil firm that attempted to sabotage competitors' wells, he said. "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption."