Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of the popular file-sharing Pirate Bay website, has been arrested in Cambodia, the local police have announced.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was held in Phnom Penh after an international warrant was issued against him in April by his native Sweden.

Sweden acted after he had failed to show up for the start of his one-year jail term for copyright violations.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and three other founders had said the website was within the law.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of the popular file-sharing Pirate Bay website, has been arrested in Cambodia

“His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology,” Cambodia’s police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency.

“We don’t have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we’ll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case,” the spokesman added.

In Sweden, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg’s former defence lawyer Ola Salomonsson confirmed the arrest, the Aftonbladet newspaper reports.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and the site’s co-founders – Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, as well financier Carl Lundstroem – were convicted by a Swedish court of encouraging copyright violations in 2009.

Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstroem all had their one-year jail terms reduced to between four and 10 months following an appeal in 2010.

They were also ordered to pay nearly $7 million in damages for copyright infringement to music and movie companies.

However, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg did not attend the appeal hearing, with his lawyer saying that he was too ill. The Swedish court then decided to uphold his sentence.

The operations of the Pirate Bay were largely shut down in Sweden six years ago, but the website has continued to function.

The site was founded in 2003, and claims to have more than 30 million users worldwide.

No copyright content is hosted on the site’s web servers. Instead, it hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on its users’ computers.