Ending a years-long legal ordeal, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has finally struck a plea deal with the US in exchange for his freedom as he was freed from a London prison on June 24.
Assange sealed a plea deal with the US Justice Department in an espionage case that began nearly 14 years ago in which he published several classified defense documents, including the wrongdoings in Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and exposed government secrets.
The 52-year-old Australian, who was in custody in Britain is set to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, stated the document filed in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific.
For years Assange had tried to dodge attempts to be extradited to the US and now he will have to plead guilty to the felony charge under the Espionage Act. As part of the deal, he will be then sentenced to 62 months—the time which he has already served in UK prisons.
Assange was taken from Belmarsh prison, where he had spent five years, to London's Stansted airport after the plea deal was accepted. He is expected to appear in a US federal court in the Mariana Islands on June 26 and will be free to return to his native country after his release.
“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, after having spent 1,901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at the Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK,” WikiLeaks said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
In 2010, Assange, an editor and publisher, released almost half a million documents relating to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on his platform WikiLeaks.
The US government named a co-accused Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, who helped Assange gain access to tens of thousands of reports, which exposed the US military misconduct in foreign countries.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail. However, in 2017 President Barack Obama commuted her sentence, allowing her release after about seven years behind bars.
Assange had also been accused of sexual molestation in which he was fighting an investigation by Swedish authorities. The investigation was later dropped.
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