(Saipan) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty as part of a deal that will see him released Wednesday at a court in Saipan, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, AFP journalists reported.
“Departure scheduled in 2 hours and 58 minutes. To Canberra, Australia,” WikiLeaks said in a social media post as Assange appeared in federal court in Saipan, a US territory in the Pacific.
Mr. Assange, 52, dressed in a black suit and an ocher tie, his hair slicked back, got out of a car and went straight into the court in this American territory in the Pacific, noted a journalist from the ‘AFP.
After leaving the United Kingdom by plane on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, Julian Assange landed in Saipan on Wednesday around 6:20 a.m. local time (4:20 p.m. [Eastern time] Tuesday).
Mr. Assange “will be a free man once the agreement (to plead guilty, Editor’s note) is validated by the judge”, which will happen “tomorrow” (Wednesday), his wife Stella told the BBC on Tuesday from Australia.
As court documents show, the WikiLeaks founder has agreed to plead guilty to one count, relating to “obtaining and disclosing national defense information,” according to Stella Assange, who has two children with the WikiLeaks founder.
Julian Assange is now being prosecuted for a single charge (“conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”), according to the documents which also cite his accomplice, the American soldier Chelsea Manning, at the origin of this massive leak.
“The priority now is for Julian to regain his health,” “he has been in a terrible state for five years” and wants “to be in contact with nature,” added the South African lawyer.
Mrs Assange has launched an appeal for donations to pay the $520,000 (€485,000) that her husband must repay to the Australian government for the charter of the plane that is to take her to Australia. He was “not allowed to take a commercial flight”, she said on X.
The whistleblower is expected to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, already served on remand in London, which would allow him to return free to his native Australia.
The Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Assange’s refusal to travel to the U.S. mainland and the territory’s proximity to Australia, according to a court filing.
The United Nations welcomed the release, saying the case had raised “a range of human rights concerns”.
“I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end,” said his mother Christine Assange, in a statement released by Australian media.
Former US Vice President Mike Pence called the agreement “false justice” which “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces”.
The deal ends a nearly 14-year saga. It came as British justice was due to examine, on July 9 and 10, an appeal by Assange against his extradition to the United States, approved by the British government in June 2022.
He was fighting not to be handed over to American justice, which is pursuing him for having made public since 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among these documents is a video showing civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.
Targeted by 18 counts, Mr. Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison by court martial in August 2013, but released after seven years after her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
The WikiLeaks founder was arrested by British police in April 2019, after seven years spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, dismissed the same year.
Since then, calls have increased for current US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him. Australia made a formal request to this effect in February.
In the first official U.S. reaction to the deal, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that because it was an ongoing legal case, it did not seem “appropriate to do for comment at this stage”.
