WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from prison in the United Kingdom and is set to travel home to Australia after he pleads guilty to a single charge of breaching the espionage law in the United States.
After a protracted legal battle, Wikileaks has announced that its founder, Julian Assange, has left the UK following a plea deal with US authorities.
The agreement entails Assange pleading guilty to criminal charges but avoiding any time in US custody.
Assange, 52, was indicted for conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, a charge stemming from Wikileaks’ release of documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the US argued had endangered lives.
Assange had been incarcerated in a British prison for the past five years, during which he contested his extradition to the US.
According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, Assange will not serve any time in US custody and will be credited for his time spent in UK incarceration. He is set to return to Australia, as per a letter from the US Justice Department.
Wikileaks reported on X (formerly Twitter) that Assange left Belmarsh prison on Monday after spending 1,901 days in a small cell. He was subsequently released at Stansted Airport in the afternoon, where he boarded a plane bound for Australia.
A video shared by Wikileaks appears to show Assange, clad in jeans and a blue shirt, being driven to Stansted before boarding the aircraft. The BBC has not independently verified the video.
Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, expressed her gratitude on Twitter to supporters who had mobilized for years to secure his release.
The plea deal, which involves Assange pleading guilty to one charge, is expected to be finalized in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, June 26.
In April, US President Joe Biden mentioned he was considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution against Assange. In a subsequent legal victory in May, the UK High Court allowed Assange to bring a new appeal against his extradition to the US, enabling him to challenge US assurances about his trial and the potential infringement of his free speech rights. Following this ruling, Stella Assange urged the Biden administration to “distance itself from this shameful prosecution.”
US prosecutors had initially sought to try Assange on 18 counts, primarily under the Espionage Act, for releasing confidential US military records and diplomatic cables related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Founded by Assange in 2006, Wikileaks claims to have published over 10 million documents, which the US government has described as “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” In 2010, Wikileaks released a video from a US military helicopter showing the killing of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.
One of Assange’s notable collaborators, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison before then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Assange also faced separate rape and sexual assault charges in Sweden, which he denied. He spent seven years in asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, claiming that the Swedish case was a pretext for extradition to the US. Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019 due to the passage of time since the original complaint, but UK authorities subsequently detained Assange for failing to surrender for extradition to Sweden.
Throughout his legal battles, Assange has rarely been seen in public and has reportedly suffered from poor health, including a minor stroke in prison in 2021.
Source: BBC, Other Media
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