Julian Assange released from prison, Wikileaks says, after striking US deal
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More news: Wikileaks has confirmed that Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh maximum security prison near London and left the UK after reaching a plea deal with the US Justice Department.
"He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK," Wikileaks said in a post on social media platform X. "After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children."
According to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, the 52-year old Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents. NBC reported he is expected to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison.
Assange has been granted a request to appear before a US federal judge on Saipan in the Mariana Islands at 9:00am local time on Wednesday, where he is expected to be sentenced to about five years, equivalent of the time he has already served in Britain, The New York Times reported. He is eventually expected to return to Australia.
Julian Assange set to be freed after reaching plea deal with US
The news: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to plead guilty as part of a plea deal with the US Justice Department that will allow him to go free after spending five years in a British prison, US media have reported.
The numbers: According to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, the 52-year old Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.
Assange is expected to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison, meaning he would be free to return to Australia, NBC reported.
The context: Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London for five years and previously spent seven years in self-exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London until his asylum was withdrawn and he was arrested in April 2019. WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents in 2010 on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history — along with swaths of diplomatic cables. Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump's administration over the mass release of the documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The sources: US District Court, NBC
