Julian Assange leaves prison after reaching an agreement with the US government that will allow him to avoid being extradited to that country

Julian Assange, founder of the leak page WikiLeaks, left the British prison where he was being held this Monday and left the United Kingdom after reaching an agreement with the US government that will allow him to avoid being extradited to the latter country. .

As revealed by court documents, in the next few hours Assange will plead guilty to a crime of espionage before a court in the United States. Northern Mariana Islandsa US territory in the Pacific, and will accept a sentence of 62 months in prison.

CBS, the BBC’s American partner, reported that Assange will not be held in US custody since he will be recognized for the time he has been imprisoned in the United Kingdom. He plans to return to Australiahis country of origin, according to a letter from the US Department of Justice.

The 52-year-old founder of WikiLeaks will plead guilty to the crime of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.

Assange had been imprisoned in the United Kingdom for 5 years, from where he was fighting to avoid his extradition to the United States, whose Justice required him due to the massive leak in 2010 by WikiLeaks of confidential government documents.

WikiLeaks reported this Monday through a statement of Assange’s release.

“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, having spent 1,901 days there. The High Court in London granted him bail and he was released at Stansted Airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the United Kingdom,” reads the statement published in X.

A video shared by WikiLeaks appears to show Assange, dressed in jeans and a blue shirt, being driven to Stansted before boarding a plane.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify the video.

His wife, Stella Assange, thanked in X his followers “who have mobilized for years and years to make this a reality.”

Assange and his lawyers had long claimed that the case against him in the US was politically motivated.

In April, the US president Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to withdraw the prosecution of Assange.

Assange faced 18 charges – most of them under the Espionage Act – for his alleged role in WikiLeaks’ massive 2010 leak of thousands of US government documents. that revealed secret information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These confidential military and diplomatic documents were provided to WikiLeaks by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

In 2017, then-US President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year prison sentence.

Last month, a British court ruled that Assange had the right to appeal against his extradition to the United States considering that the government of that country had not provided sufficient guarantees that he would have the same freedom of expression protections as a US citizen.

Assange had been imprisoned in the United Kingdom for five years after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, from where he was forcibly removed and detained in April 2019 after his asylum was withdrawn by the Ecuadorian authorities.

When he entered the embassy, ​​Assange was facing charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he always denied, claiming that the Swedish government wanted to extradite him to the United States.

To his admirers, Assange is a courageous champion of truth. For his critics, he is only seeking publicity even at the cost of endangering the lives of others by revealing sensitive information.

Those who know him describe him as an intense, motivated and very intelligent person, with an exceptional ability to decipher computer codes.

In 2006 he created WikiLeaks, a website that publishes confidential documents and imagesgenerally leaked by sources not publicly identified in order to reveal scandals and cases of corruption.

In April of that year, the site made headlines around the world by revealing images of US soldiers firing from a helicopter, killing 18 civilians in Iraq.

From that moment on he adopted a nomadic lifestyle as he became famous for his revelations.

In 2010 WikiLeaks became even more popular with the massive leak of classified US Army material on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That same year, Sweden claimed him for two accusations of sexual harassment.

Swedish authorities wanted to question him over allegations that he had raped one woman and sexually harassed another in August 2010, during a visit to Stockholm to give a lecture.

He He assured that both meetings were consensual.

Assange spent the months following the indictment under house arrest in a rural English house, from where he fought the extradition order to Sweden.

At the end of May 2012, however, the UK Supreme Court ordered the extradition to be carried out.

Days later, Assange appeared in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and requested asylum, arguing that there was “persecution” against him.

The country’s president at the time, Rafael Correa, granted him asylum.

In May 2017, the Swedish Justice decided to close the case, unable to continue with the investigation due to the confinement condition of the accused.

However, even though extradition to Sweden was no longer a threat, the Australian refused to leave the embassy, ​​because he considered that he ran the risk of being sent to the US for interrogation about Wikileaks activities.

In April 2019, the then president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, revoked his asylum and Assange was sent to prison in London, where he has been imprisoned until now.

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