Wednesday, June 26, 2024 - WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange has been freed from prison in the United Kingdom and is travelling home to Australia after he agreed a deal with the US to plead guilty to a single charge of breaching the espionage law in the United States.
Assange, 52, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to
obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to a
filing in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
According to Reuters, he was freed from the UK’s
high-security Belmarsh prison on Monday, June 24, and taken to the airport,
from where he flew out of the country.
Assange will appear at a court in Saipan, a US Pacific
territory, at 9am on Wednesday (23:00 GMT on Tuesday), where he will be
sentenced to 62 months of the time already served.
A video posted on X by WikiLeaks showed Assange dressed in a
blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet.
He will return to Australia after the hearing, the WikiLeaks statement added, referring to the hearing in Saipan.
“Julian Assange is free,”
WikiLeaks said in a statement on X.
“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.”
According to reports , the aircraft carrying Assange landed
in Bangkok on Tuesday to refuel before flying the WikiLeaks founder to the US
territory.
Julian Assange’s wife Stella said she was “elated” and it
was “incredible” that her husband was set to be freed.
“I’m just elated,” she said
on Tuesday, speaking from Australia.
“He will be a free man once
it has been signed off by the judge and that will happen sometime tomorrow.”
“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions,” WikiLeaks said in its statement announcing the plea deal.
“As editor-in-chief, Julian
paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he
returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained
utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.”
Assange became infamous with
the launch of WikiLeaks in 2006, creating an online whistleblower platform for
people to submit classified material such as documents and videos anonymously.
Footage of a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, which
killed a dozen people, including two journalists, raised the platform’s
profile, while the 2010 release of hundreds of thousands of classified US
documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a trove of diplomatic
cables, cemented its reputation.
The administration of former US president Donald Trump
decided to charge him in 2019 with 17 counts of breaching the Espionage Act.
US lawyers had argued he conspired with Chelsea Manning, a
former army intelligence analyst, who spent seven years in prison for leaking
material to WikiLeaks. She was freed when President Barack Obama commuted her
sentence in 2017.
.jpg)
.jpg)
0 Comments