(Washington) One of the most wanted men in the world, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, has reached a guilty plea agreement with the American justice system allowing him to regain his freedom after five years of detention in the United Kingdom.
Prosecuted for exposing hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, this 52-year-old Australian must appear Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time (Tuesday 7 p.m. Eastern time) in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a US Pacific territory, according to court documents made public overnight from Monday to Tuesday.
Now the subject of a criminal investigation for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense,” he is expected to plead guilty to this charge alone, according to these documents, which also cite his accomplice, American soldier Chelsea Manning, who was behind this massive leak.
Julian Assange should be sentenced to 62 months in prison, already served on remand in London, which would allow him to return free to his native Australia.
“Julian Assange is free” and left the United Kingdom and the high security prison near London where he had been incarcerated since 2019, to board a plane at Stansted airport, said the WikiLeaks organization, welcoming that he can reunite with his wife, Stella Assange, and their children, “the result of a global campaign”.
” Too long ”
The Australian government also welcomed this outcome, saying that the Assange case had “drawn on for too long” and that his continued detention was no longer of any interest.
This agreement, which puts an end to a saga of almost 14 years, comes two weeks before a new crucial hearing before the British courts. This was to examine on July 9 and 10 Julian Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the United States.
He was fighting not to be handed over to American justice, which is pursuing him for having made public since 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among these documents is a video showing civilians, including two Reuters journalists, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.
PHOTO MATT DUNHAM, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Julian Assange in 2019
He theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
The British government approved his extradition in June 2022.
In the latest twist in this long-running affair which has become a symbol for its supporters of the threats to press freedom, two British judges in May granted Julian Assange the right to appeal against his extradition.
That appeal was to include whether he would benefit from free speech protection as an alien in the U.S. legal system.
The WikiLeaks founder was arrested by British police in April 2019 after seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in order to avoid his extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, which was closed the same year.
Since then, calls have increased for US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him. Australia made a formal request to this effect in February, which Mr. Biden said he was considering, raising hope among his supporters.