Updated
Jun 25, 2024, 08:44 AM
Published
Jun 25, 2024, 08:28 AM
WASHINGTON – Wikileaks said on June 24 that its founder, Julian Assange, had left a British prison on June 24 and flown out of the United Kingdom.
Wikileaks announced Assange’s whereabouts shortly after court documents showed he was due to plead guilty later this week to violating US espionage law, in a deal that will allow him to return home to Australia.
Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents 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 WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that he, as the publisher of WikiLeaks, should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech. REUTERS
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