WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned home to Australia a free man on Wednesday after pleading guilty in a deal that ended his years-long legal battle over the publication of U.S. military secrets.
Assange’s plane, tracked online by thousands of people, touched down in the Australian capital Canberra at 7:37 p.m. (5:37 a.m. ET), data from flight tracking platform Flightradar24 showed.
He hugged his wife and father and raised a clenched fist in salute to his supporters.
“Finally free”, WikiLeaks said in a post on X.
It was the end of a round-the-world trip that began on Monday when Assange left Britain, where he spent more than five years in prison while fighting extradition to the United States.
Assange, 52, flew on a charter plane to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US community north of Guam, where on Wednesday morning he pleaded guilty under the US Espionage Act to a single criminal charge of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information.
His guilty plea was the final chapter in a legal saga that began more than a decade ago, when he published a collection of confidential documents that embarrassed several governments and which, according to the US government, threatened national security and helped adversaries.
“I believe that the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction with each other, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all these circumstances,” Assange said in the US federal court in Saipan, according to an NBC. Affiliate news reporter who was in the audience.
Under the plea deal revealed on Monday, Assange was sentenced to the 62 months he already served in prison in Britain. From Saipan, Assange then headed about 3,400 miles south to Australia, where he was born and is a citizen.
His wife, Stella Assange, said she was “elated, excited, exhausted”, telling viewers on a YouTube live stream before his arrival: “I’m very nervous and excited to meet Julian at the airport.”
Australian authorities have long pressed the US to abandon its extradition efforts or find a diplomatic solution that would allow Assange to return home.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday that “regardless of your opinion of Mr. Assange’s activities, his case has dragged on for far too long.”
“There is nothing to be gained from his continued incarceration and we want him to be brought home to Australia,” he told reporters in Canberra.
Assange’s return home came at “an enormous cost”, said Stella Assange. She said Assange was not allowed to fly commercially 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 indicted on 17 counts of espionage and one count of computer misuse in connection with publications by WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006.
With the help of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the site leaked approximately 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables, as well as classified US military documents and videos from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians.
In your 2019 indictmentthe Justice Department called it “one of the largest compromises of classified information in United States history.”
“Assange’s decision to reveal the names of human sources illegally shared with him by Manning created a serious and imminent risk to human life,” the department said. said in a statement following Assange’s guilty plea on Wednesday.
Assange’s legal problems began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him over allegations of sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, after being extradited to Sweden, he was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he lived for almost seven years.
The embassy revoked Assange’s political asylum in 2019, leading to his arrest and imprisonment. Although Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation later that year, the US made a formal extradition request for Assange to spend five years fighting in the high-security Belmarsh prison on the outskirts of London.
Barry Pollack, Assange’s US attorney, said outside court in Saipan on Wednesday that as a journalist and editor, Assange should never have been charged.
“Mr. Assange revealed true, important and newsworthy information, including the revelation that the United States committed war crimes,” he said.
Despite his guilty plea, Assange’s family says he will seek a US presidential pardon, arguing the deal sets a dangerous precedent for journalists.
“The fact that there is a guilty plea under the Espionage Act in relation to obtaining and disseminating national defense information is obviously a very serious concern for journalists and national security journalists in general,” Stella Assange, a lawyer, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Assange is reuniting with his wife and two children, whom Assange fathered while living in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
“They are bouncing like two little balls bouncing on the couch,” Stella Assange said on the live broadcast. “They are very, very excited.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
