Julian Assange

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, pleaded guilty to a single espionage charge in front of a US judge Wednesday and walked free after a 12-year battle against extradition to the United States ended in a plea deal.

The controversial figure was released from a British prison on Monday and flew by charter jet to a remote US territory in the Pacific, where he officially entered his guilty plea and was sentenced to time served. He then flew to Australia, arriving home as a free man on Wednesday night.

The 52-year-old has spent the last five years in a high-security prison in southeast London, and nearly seven years before that holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in the British capital, attempting to avoid arrest, which could have resulted in life imprisonment.

The WikiLeaks founder

On Monday, Assange agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge stemming from his alleged role in one of the largest US government breaches of classified materials, which occurred after his whistleblowing website published nearly half a million secret military documents related to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The plea deal caps a years-long legal saga that has spanned multiple continents.

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After striking a plea agreement with the US, Julian Assange was released from UK jail.

Where is Assange?

According to a statement released on Tuesday by WikiLeaks, Assange boarded a flight from London's Stansted airport on Monday after being granted bail from prison.

"Julian Assange is free," WikiLeaks announced. "He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1,901 days there."

Assange travelled to Saipan, the largest island and capital of the remote Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific, with Australia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith.

Under the terms of the agreement, US Justice Department prosecutors sought a 62-month sentence, which is equivalent to the time Assange spent in the United Kingdom fighting extradition.

The plea deal credited that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia.

With Assange resistant to setting foot in the continental US to enter his guilty plea, a judge conducted the hearing and sentencing together on Wednesday in Saipan, where a US federal district court is located.

US charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with espionage

“It appears that your 62 months imprisonment is fair and reasonable,” Judge Ramona Manglona said in her sentencing. “You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man.”

The Pacific island chain is a US territory some 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) west of Hawaii and closer to Australia, where Assange is a citizen and traveled onto next.

What did Assange do?

US authorities wanted Assange on espionage charges stemming from Wikileaks' disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified military and government data provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011.

The US accused Assange of threatening the lives of secret sources by leaking the unfiltered cables, and has been seeking his extradition for years.

He faced 18 charges for his alleged role in the breach, with a potential sentence of 175 years in jail. The British authorities had sought guarantees from the US that he would not face the death penalty.

From Townsville, eastern Queensland, Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 as an online repository that would publish anonymously submitted material, including the US military’s operating manual for its detention camp in Guantanamo Bay and internal documents from the Church of Scientology.

In 2010, WikiLeaks was catapulted to global attention when it released video that claimed to show a deadly 2007 US helicopter attack in Iraq.

Soon after, WikiLeaks released thousands of classified US military documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a trove of diplomatic cables.

Assange described the documents previously to us as “compelling evidence of war crimes” committed by US-led coalition and Iraqi government forces.

Fight against extradition

Assange had long argued the case against him was politically motivated, that he would not face a fair trial, and his handover would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

Free speech advocates condemned the extradition attempt, saying it would have a chilling effect on press freedom.

In August 2010, Assange was accused of sexual assault in Sweden and faced an international arrest warrant. He denied the allegations as “a smear campaign” and refused to go to Stockholm for questioning.

He turned himself in to British authorities, but while on bail in 2012, Assange fled to Ecuador's embassy, requesting political asylum.

During his time in the embassy, Wikileaks continued to release data dumps, including thousands of emails allegedly hacked from the Democratic National Committee and stolen from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, on the eve of the US election.

However, his relationship with his host deteriorated over time, and Ecuador's president was pressured by the US to remove him from the diplomatic safe haven.

In 2019, Assange was pulled from the embassy by London’s Metroplitan Police on an extradition warrant from the US Justice Department, and spent the next five years living mostly isolated, in a 3-by-2-meter cell at Belmarsh prison.

The prison has capacity for more than 900 inmates and is known for once housing infamous terror suspects such as the radical Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri within its high-security unit.