WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will this week be freed by pleading guilty to breaking US espionage laws, in a deal that would end his detention in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a long legal odyssey.
Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to one criminal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents, according to a filing in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
Earlier in the day, court documents revealed that Assange is expected to plead guilty to a US espionage charge as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
"Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK," WikiLeaks said on X.
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a…
The statement confirmed reports that Assange has a deal with the US Department of Justice, which is yet to be formally finalized.
Assange, an Australian citizen, was transferred to London's high-security Belmarsh prison in April 2019 on bail breach charges. In the US, he faced prosecution under the Espionage Act for obtaining and disclosing classified information that shed light on war crimes and human rights violations committed by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet.
Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024
He will return to Australia after the hearing, the Wikileaks statement added, referring to the hearing in Saipan. Australia's government, which has been pressing for Assange's release, had no immediate comment.
A lawyer for Assange did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables.
Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump's administration over WikiLeaks' mass release of secret U.S. documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of Wikileaks should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech. An Australian government spokesperson said: "Prime Minister (Anthony) Albanese has been clear - Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration."
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador's embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. He has been in London's Belmarsh top security jail ever since, from where he has for almost five years been fighting extradition to the United States.
Those five years of confinement are similar to the sentence imposed on Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor, who was sentenced to 63 months after she removed classified materials and mailed them to a news outlet.
While in Belmarsh Assange married his partner Stella with whom he had two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.
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