Julian Assange was reported to have been released from prison on Monday, June 24, 2024, and has left Britain. This was the aftermath of a truce reached with US authorities that brought an end to his years-long legal drama, says WikiLeaks.

“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks wrote on X of its founder, who had been detained in Britain for five years as he fought extradition to the United States which sought to prosecute him for revealing military secrets.

Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, according to a document filed in court in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.
He is billed to appear in the US territory on Wednesday morning, June 26, 2023, local time.

He is expected to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, with credit for the five years and two months he has served in prison in Britain. This means he could return to his native Australia. The Australian government said that Assange’s case had “dragged on for too long” and there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”

Recall that the publisher, who is now 52 years old, wanted for prosecution by Washington for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret US documents from 2010 when he was the head of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
During his trial, Assange became a champion for free speech campaigners around the world and a villain to those who thought he endangered US national security and intelligence sources by revealing secrets.

US authorities wanted to put Assange on trial for disclosing military secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The plea bargain agreement will probably put an end to Assange’s nearly 14-year legal drama. Assange was found guilty by a US federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of national security documents.

The announcement of the deal came two weeks before Assange was scheduled to appear in court in Britain to appeal a ruling approving his extradition to the United States. He had been detained in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London since April 2019. The United States has accused Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act.

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