New Delhi: After seven years in self-exile and five years at a UK high-security prison, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, walked free Wednesday. He pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of violating the US Espionage Act, for which he was sentenced to time already served in British prison.
With this, Assange’s more than a decade of legal woes over publishing hundreds of thousands of secret documents, including US military files, on his website WikiLeaks, come to an end.
An Australian citizen, Assange departed London Monday on a private jet bound towards Saipan, the capital of Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth territory, close to Australia and where one of the furthest federal judicial outposts exists.
“As part of the plea agreement, Assange was transported to the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands to enter his felony guilty plea and be sentenced on the morning of 26 June (Saipan local time) in a US courtroom, with the venue reflecting Assange’s opposition to travelling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea and the proximity of this federal US District Court to Assange’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which he will return,” said the US Justice Department in a statement Tuesday.
“Following the imposition of sentence, he will depart the United States for his native Australia. Pursuant to the plea agreement, Assange is prohibited from returning to the United States without permission,” it added.
The crux of the charges against Assange is that he “conspired” with Chelsea Manning, a US military intelligence analyst, to “unlawfully obtain and disclose” classified documents on national security, according to the US Justice Department.
The war-logs and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks included details of the US armed forces wrongdoings in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a video of a 2007 US military chopper attack in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
Manning, who leaked documents from the US military, was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to 10 of 22 charges in 2013. Her sentence was commuted in 2017 by then US President Barack Obama.
Apart from the military documents, Assange and his team at WikiLeaks also released a trove of emails which embarrassed the US Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in 2016 in the final weeks of the US election campaign against Donald Trump. Clinton lost the poll.
A timeline of events
In 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing documents received from Chelsea Manning, including the US helicopter attack in Baghdad and thousands of diplomatic cables. The very next year, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange after two women came forward accusing him of sexual assault and molestation. Assange denied the charges.
In 2012, he sought and gained asylum from Ecuador after losing his appeal against extradition to Sweden. He lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the next seven years till 2019. WikiLeaks continued to publish documents through his stay in the embassy, including the Democratic Party emails in 2016.
In 2018, the US Justice Department filed charges and obtained an indictment against Assange. Swedish prosecutors in 2019 dropped their charges and Ecuador revoked his asylum claim and invited British officials to arrest him.
Assange remained in prison between 2019 and 2024 at Belmarsh – a high-security prison complex in southeast London.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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