WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to Australia on Wednesday a different man and pleaded to be held accountable in a resolution that ended his years-long criminal battle over the newspaper’s leak of US military secrets and techniques.
Information from flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 shows Assange’s plane, which was tracked by hundreds of people online, touched down over the Australian capital, Canberra, at 7:37 p.m. (5:37 a.m. ET) in poor condition.
He hugged his wife and father and raised his closed fist in a salute to his cheering supporters.
“Free at Last,” WikiLeaks said in a post on,
It was the end of a worldwide tour that began on Monday as Assange left Britain, where he has spent more than five years in prison while fighting extradition to the US.
Assange, 52, flew on a chartered plane to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth north of Guam, where on Wednesday morning he pleaded guilty to a single criminal count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense data as part of a US espionage operation. Ordained.
His responsible plea was the overall bankruptcy in a criminal saga that began more than a decade ago, when he published a trove of labeled documents that embarrassed multiple governments and that the U.S. government says threaten national security. There was danger and the opponents had received help.
“I believe that the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in conflict with each other, but I acknowledge that given all these circumstances such a case would be difficult to win,” Assange said in U.S. federal court in Saipan. Said, according to an NBC News associate reporter who was at the hearing.
In response to the petition filed on Monday, Assange was sentenced to 62 months, which he had already served in a British prison. From Saipan, he later moved some 3,400 miles south to Australia, where he was born and is a citizen.
His wife, Stella Assange, said she was “excited, excited, exhausted”, telling viewers in a YouTube livestream before his arrival, “I’m so nervous and excited to meet Julian at the airport.”
The Australian government had long lobbied the US to drop its extradition efforts or receive a diplomatic response that would allow Assange to return home.
“We wanted him to be brought home. That’s what happened tonight,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese advised reporters after Assange’s arrival. “This is the culmination of careful, patient and tenacious advocacy.”
Stella Assange said Assange’s return home had come at a “huge cost”. He said Assange did not have permission to fly industrial flights and owed the Australian government $520,000 for the cost of his flight.
A crowdfunding campaign launched by his supporters had raised nearly $400,000 as of Wednesday morning.
Assange was convicted of 17 counts of espionage and one count of PC sabotage in relation to publications through WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006.
With backup from whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Page leaked approximately 250,000 Shepp Branch diplomatic cables, as well as labeled US military documents and video from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad In which civilians were killed. ,
In its 2019 indictment, the Justice Branch called it “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
In a comment on Assange’s accountability petition on Wednesday, the section noted, “Assange’s decision to disclose the names of human sources illegally shared with him by Manning poses a grave and imminent threat to human life “
Assange’s criminal problems began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to interrogate him over allegations of sexual assault made by two girls. In 2012, when he was ordered to be extradited to Sweden, he was granted political asylum through the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remained for almost seven years.
The embassy revoked Assange’s political asylum in 2019, citing his arrest and imprisonment. Despite the fact that Swedish prosecutors closed their investigation into the next life, the US made a justified extradition request that required Assange to spend five years in the high-security Belmarsh prison on the outskirts of London.
Assange’s US lawyer Barry Pollack said outside court in Saipan on Wednesday that as a journalist and author, Assange should never have been charged.
“Mr. Assange disclosed true, important, and newsworthy information, including the revelation that the United States had committed war crimes,” he said.
Despite his accountability plea, Assange’s country says it will seek a pardon from the US president, arguing that the offer sets a deadly precedent for journalists.
In the intervening period, Assange has been reuniting with his wife and his two sons, whom Assange fathered when he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy.
“They’re bouncing around like two little balls bouncing on the couch,” Stella Assange said in the livestream. “They’re very, very excited.”
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