Julian Assange cuts deal to plead guilty, gain freedom
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday (UK local time) walked out of the Belmarsh prison in the UK after he was due to plead guilty this week to violating US espionage law, in a deal that ended his imprisonment in the country and allowed him to return home to Australia. The 52-year-old agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to disclose classified US national defence documents.
Assange had been detained in the UK for five years as he fought extradition charges by the US, which sought to prosecute him for revealing military secrets. The UK government approved his extradition in June 2022. He is scheduled to appear in the US territory on Wednesday (local time).
“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there”, WikiLeaks tweeted. In a long post, WikiLeaks said Assange was granted bail by the High Court in London and released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
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…
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024
He is expected to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, with credit for the five years he has served in prison in the UK.
About the espionage case
In 2010, WikiLeaks released thousands of classified US military documents during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history. There were over 700,000 documents that included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts. Assange was indicted by a US federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of national security documents.
The whistleblower of WikiLeaks was a US military officer Bradley Manning. He was convicted for 64 years and during his jail term, Bradley converted to female Chelsa Manning and obtained a Presidential pardon from Barack Obama in 2016. Assange got asylum at Britain’s Ecuador Embassy in 2011. In 2019, the Embassy asked him to go and allowed British Police to arrest him in mid-2019. In 2022, the United Kingdom agreed to extradite Julian Assange to the United States.[1]
Reference:
[1] UK agrees to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US – Jun 17, 2022, PGurus.com
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