WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty in a US court in Saipan on Wednesday, AFP correspondents reported, setting him free after years of legal drama in the case.
The 52-year-old pleaded guilty in court to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific.
“I am guilty on the information,” Assange said, later joking to the judge during the proceedings that his satisfaction “depends on the outcome of the hearing”.
Assange has long been wanted by Washington since he leaked millions of secret US documents in 2010 as head of the website WikiLeaks.
On Monday he was released from a high-security British prison where he had been held for five years while fighting extradition to the United States.
He is expected to be sentenced on Wednesday to five years and two months in prison, which will also include time already spent in prison in Britain.
Assange’s wife Stella said he would be a “free man” and thanked supporters who campaigned for his release.
She told BBC radio: “We weren’t sure until the last 24 hours that it was actually happening,” adding that she was “very happy”.
A court filing said the Northern Mariana Islands were chosen because Assange was unwilling to move to the United States and is also close to Australia.
WikiLeaks said on social media platform X that Assange would fly to Canberra, Australia after the hearing concluded, adding that the deal “should never have happened.”
The Australian Government said his case had “drawn on for too long” and that “nothing would be achieved by his continued imprisonment”.
– The end of a difficult test –
Since 2010, Assange has become a hero to campaigners for freedom of expression, and a villain to those who thought he endangered US security and intelligence sources.
US authorities wanted to prosecute Assange for revealing military secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2019, he was indicted by a US federal grand jury on 18 counts relating to the publication of national security documents by WikiLeaks.
The United Nations praised Assange’s release, saying the case had raised “numerous human rights concerns”.
In a statement released by Australian media, Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said she was “grateful that my son’s suffering is finally coming to an end.”
But former US Vice President Mike Pence denounced the plea deal against X, calling it a “miscarriage of justice” that “dishonours the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces.”
The deal was announced two weeks before Assange was due to appear in a UK court to appeal a decision to extradite him to the United States.
– Extradition battle –
Assange has been detained at London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since April 2019.
He was arrested after spending seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault charges that were eventually dropped.
The material he released through WikiLeaks included a video of civilians killed by fire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007. The victims included a photographer and a driver for Reuters.
The United States has charged Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 and supporters have warned he could face up to 175 years in prison.
The British government had approved his extradition in June 2022, but two British judges recently said in May that he could appeal against the transfer.
The plea agreement was not entirely unexpected. US President Joe Biden had been under growing pressure to drop the long-running case against Assange.
The Australian government made an official request in February and Biden said he would consider it, raising hopes among Assange’s supporters that his troubles might now be over.
In the first official U.S. reaction to the plea agreement, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that because the case was going to go before a judge, “I think it would be appropriate for me not to comment on the matter at this time.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)