WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange is to be a “free man,” his wife said yesterday, once a judge signs off on a plea deal with US authorities to bring his years-long legal drama to a close.
Assange was released on Monday from a high-security British prison where he had been held for five years while he fought extradition to the US, which sought to prosecute him for revealing military secrets.
He flew out of London to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific where he is to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a court document said.
Photo: EPA-EFE / WikiLeaks
A charter plane carrying the 52-year-old landed in Bangkok at about 12:30pm yesterday for a scheduled refueling stop.
From there it was scheduled to fly to Saipan, capital of the US territory where Assange is due in court today.
He is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the same amount of time he spent behind bars in Britain.
Assange’s wife, Stella, said he would be a “free man” after the judge signed off on the deal, thanking supporters who have campaigned for his release for years.
“I’m just elated. Frankly, it’s just incredible,” she told BBC radio.
She urged supporters to monitor her husband’s flight on plane-tracking Web sites and to follow the “AssangeJet” hashtag, saying in a post on social media platform X “we need all eyes on his flight in case something goes wrong.”
The court in the Northern Mariana Islands was chosen because of Assange’s unwillingness to go to the continental US and because of the territory’s proximity to his native Australia, a court filing said.
Under the deal, Assange is due to return to Australia, where the government said his case had “dragged on for too long” and there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”
WikiLeaks posted a video on X showing Assange looking out of the window as the private jet landed in Bangkok, then stepping off the plane onto the tarmac.
Assange was wanted by Washington for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret US documents from 2010 as head of the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks.
Since then he has become a hero to free speech campaigners and a villain to those who thought he endangered US security and intelligence sources.
The UN hailed Assange’s release, saying the case had raised “a series of human rights concerns.”
However, former US vice president Mike Pence slammed the plea deal on X as a “miscarriage of justice” that “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces.”
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