WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his country, Australia, on Wednesday aboard a charter plane hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing US military secrets.
Assange’s plane arrived in the Australian capital, Canberra, from the Northern Mariana Islands, where he pleaded guilty in a US district court to conspiring to illegally obtain and disseminate classified information in 2010.
The US court recognized the five years he spent in a London prison fighting his extradition to the United States and allowed him to return to Australia without serving any further jail time.
“After almost 14 years of arbitrary detention in the United Kingdom, and 5 years in a maximum security prison for his innovative work, Julian Assange has returned home to Australia,” WikiLeaks highlights in its X account.
Assange, who is expected to be picked up at the airport by his wife, Stella Assange, and their two children, is scheduled to hold a press conference at a hotel in the Australian capital in a couple of hours, his first appearance in front of the media since He was released on Monday in the United Kingdom.
The 52-year-old Australian activist, journalist and hacker appeared early on Wednesday in the US federal court of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan, where Judge Ramona Villagomez accepted the terms agreed between the US Department of Justice. .US and the defense of Assange.
Under the agreement, in which Assange pleaded guilty today to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US documents, Villagomez sentenced Assange to 62 months in prison, recognizing time already served in the high-security Belmarsh prison ( United Kingdom), so he was released.
The Australian’s defense requested that the hearing be held in this US territory due to its proximity to Australia and because Assange did not wish to travel to the continental United States.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to plead guilty as part of a deal with the US Justice Department that will allow him to be freed after spending five years in a British prison.
This episode ends a 14-year saga that began in 2010 with the largest leak of classified documents in United States history, revealing attacks on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantánamo, among others. affairs.
Following the leak, Sweden issued an arrest warrant on charges of sexual abuse, which were later dropped. Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, until he was arrested by British authorities in 2019, spending the last five years in a high-security prison.
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