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The founder of WikiLeaks, Australian journalist Julian Assange, was released this Monday from the United Kingdom prison where he remained for almost 2,000 days, and will soon be an officially free man.
Assange, who shook the world in 2010 with his leaks about the US Government and Army, was released from prison where he was awaiting possible deportation after reaching an agreement with the US Department of Justice.
The 52-year-old activist traveled to the island of Saipan, territory of the US archipelago of the Marianas, in the Pacific, where this Wednesday he will plead guilty to violating the US espionage law, international media report.
This acceptance will carry a sentence of 62 months in prison, which is equivalent to the time he has spent incarcerated in the United Kingdom, so he will automatically be released.
He is expected to return to Australia after the hearing in Saipan.
Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
Had he been extradited to the United States, where a file of criminal charges hung over him, the journalist could have faced a combined sentence of 175 years in prison.
On Monday, the High Court in London released Julian Assange, who spent more than five years imprisoned in a maximum security prison, on an arrest warrant issued from the United States for dissemination of secret documents.
“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, after having spent 1,901 days there,” reads a Wikileaks statement published on its X social network account.
“He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted Airport in the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and left the United Kingdom,” the message added.
The agreement puts an end to his imprisonment, a period in which his physical and mental health suffered significantly, and will allow him to return to his country, Australia, ending a long legal odyssey.
The media bombshell
In 2010, the WikiLeaks portal published more than 250,000 classified documents from the State Department related to Washington’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and hundreds of thousands of communications from US embassies.
The critical volume of secret information had a first scapegoat, Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst born Bradley Edward Manning, who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Manning was pardoned by President Obama in 2017, but later returned to prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury about a WikiLeaks investigation.
In 2020, a judge decided to release her again, shortly after her legal team claimed that she had attempted suicide in prison.
The scandal was considered the largest security breach of its kind in US military history. Assange was formally charged during the administration of former President Donald Trump and kept imprisoned in the United Kingdom, while an intense legal battle unfolded with his extradition and his release as requests from both sides.
The more than 700,000 documents eventually released included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts, such as a 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter shooting at suspected insurgents in Iraq. The attack killed a dozen people, including two Reuters agency staff.
In total, the Wikileaks website published 391 thousand Pentagon documents on the Iraq war, 91 thousand documents on the war in Afghanistan and 250 thousand diplomatic documents related to the campaign in Afghan territory.
Asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy
Assange’s revelations exposed the identity of US collaborators and informants around the world.
Assange was first detained in Britain in 2010 under a European arrest warrant, after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over allegations of alleged sexual crimes that were later dropped.
The journalist then fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, where he remained in asylum for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
In 2019, the Ecuadorian government, then chaired by Lenín Moreno, ignored the right to asylum and allowed the British police to break into the legation and drag the refugee out.
Assange was then sent to London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison, from which he resisted extradition to the United States through various legal resources.
Those five years of confinement are similar to the sentence imposed on Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor, who was sentenced to 63 months after stealing classified material and mailing it to a media outlet.
During his stay in Belmarsh, Assange married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Now he will finally be able to finally reunite with his family and supporters, who have supported him for years and insisted on his release. This campaign has been joined by personalities from all over the world, from progressive politicians to artists and intellectuals, who are now celebrating the news of Assange’s release.
Even Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had repeatedly asked the United States to conclude the case, and in April, US President Joe Biden said he was “considering” it.
(With information from international media and agencies)
