After years of legal battles, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has left the UK after reaching a deal with US authorities. This agreement will see him plead guilty to criminal charges and subsequently go free. Assange, 52, faced charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.
The US had long argued that the Wikileaks disclosures, which included information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, endangered lives. Assange had spent the last five years in a British prison, where he was fighting extradition to the US. According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time served in the UK. He will return to Australia, as confirmed by a letter from the US Department of Justice.
On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Wikileaks announced that Assange left Belmarsh prison on Monday after 1,901 days in a small cell. He was released at Stansted airport in the afternoon and boarded a plane to return to Australia. Video shared online by Wikileaks shows Assange, dressed in jeans and a blue shirt, being driven to Stansted before boarding an aircraft. The BBC has not independently verified the video.
Assange’s wife, Stella, thanked his supporters on Twitter, acknowledging their efforts over the years. The 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. The Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Pacific, are much closer to Australia than courts in Hawaii or the continental US.
A spokesperson for Australia’s government told Agence France-Presse that the case had “dragged on for too long.” Assange’s attorney, Richard Miller, declined to comment, and the BBC has also reached out to his US-based lawyer. Assange and his legal team have long maintained that the case against him was politically motivated.
In April, US President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution against Assange. In May, the UK High Court ruled that Assange could bring a new appeal against extradition to the US, allowing him to challenge assurances regarding his trial and free speech rights. Following the ruling, Stella Assange urged the Biden administration to distance itself from what she described as a “shameful prosecution.”
US prosecutors initially wanted to try Assange on 18 counts, mostly under the Espionage Act, for releasing confidential US military records and diplomatic messages related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Wikileaks, founded by Assange in 2006, claims to have published over 10 million documents in what the US government called “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
In 2010, Wikileaks published a video from a US military helicopter showing the killing of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters news reporters, in Baghdad. One of Assange’s prominent collaborators, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison, although her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017.
Assange also faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denied. He spent seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy, fearing extradition to the US via Sweden. Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019, citing the elapsed time since the original complaint, but UK authorities later detained him for not surrendering to the courts for extradition to Sweden.
Throughout these legal battles, Assange has rarely been seen in public and has reportedly suffered from poor health, including a minor stroke in prison in 2021.
