Julian Assange Freed From Prison After Striking Deal With US

Julian Assange has been released from Belmarsh prison in the UK. The WikiLeaks founder has been released after striking a plea deal with the United States Justice Department. Later this week, Assange is expected to appear in a US Federal Court in the Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Western Pacific, and plead guilty.

According to a BBC report, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK as part of the deal. The report, citing the letter from the US justice department, also mentioned that Assange will return to Australia. WikiLeaks, founded in 2006, made headlines after it published more than 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghanistan war in 2010. The online platform also released almost 400,000 secret US files on the Iraq war. 

The US administration later described it as "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." According to The Washington Post, a former US soldier named Chelsea Manning, who had leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, was arrested in the same year. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, and Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

The 52-year-old Assange also faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden. He spent seven years in Ecuador's London embassy. On that occasion, he also claimed that the case would lead him to be sent to the US. However, in 2019, the Swedish authorities dropped the rape investigation against Assange. The same year, UK police entered the embassy with the Ecuadorean government's permission and detained Assange for "failing to surrender to the court" over a warrant, and the extradition hearings began in February 2020. 

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks wrote in a post on X that Assange had left Belmarsh on Wednesday after 1,901 days and had departed on a flight from Stansted airport. "This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations," added WikiLeaks in the post.