Assange to be freed after pleading guilty to US charge

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.

Assange, 52, agreed to admit a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

The deal marks the end of a legal saga in which Assange spent years in a British high-security jail and in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and fought allegations of sex crimes in Sweden while battling extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.

Plane carrying Julian Assange at Mueang International Airport
The plane carrying Julian Assange stopped in Bangkok for refuelling on the way to Saipan. (EPA PHOTO)

Viewed as a villain by the US government for potentially putting classified government sources at risk, he was hailed as a hero by free-press advocates for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes.

He is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday morning, local time.

The US territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange’s opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.

Australian-born Assange left Belmarsh prison in the UK on Monday and was bailed by the High Court before boarding a flight at Stansted Airport. 

He landed at a Bangkok airport for refuelling about noon on Tuesday, local time.

“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press-freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.

“I’m just elated,” his wife, Stella Assange, told BBC radio, speaking from Australia. 

“He will be a free man once (the deal)has been signed off by the judge and that will happen sometime tomorrow.”

A video posted on X by WikiLeaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet with the markings of charter firm VistaJet.

Assange would return to Australia after the hearing, Wikileaks said. 

“Julian’s family are over the moon that he is free, there is a little bit of a way to go until he is safe and sound, back on Australian soil, but I think everybody is working on this,” his brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters from France.

Stella Assange, wife of Julian Assange
Julian Assange’s wife Stella has expressed her joy in a social media post. (AP PHOTO)

WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history – along with swathes of diplomatic cables.

Assange was indicted during president Donald Trump’s administration over WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US 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 US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people. 

The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of WikiLeaks should not face charges typically used against government employees who steal or leak information.

Many press-freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech.

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. 

Julian Assange supporters at the Royal Courts of Justice in London
Press freedom advocates argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech. (AP PHOTO)

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 in Belmarsh prison for skipping bail, spending almost five years fighting extradition to the United States.

Manning was jailed for 35 years, but president Barack Obama reduced the term to seven years, saying her sentence was disproportionate.

While in Belmarsh Assange married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while he was stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Agencies

Reuters