By Anthony Marcus, correspondent for Eurasia Business News, June 25, 2024. Article n°1053.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been released from Belmarsh prison in the UK after striking a plea deal with US authorities.

Under this agreement, Assange will plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to acquire and disclose national defense information.

The 52-year-old Australian had spent 1,901 days in the high-security British prison while fighting extradition to the US. 

As part of the deal, Assange is expected to receive a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served in Britain.

Following his release, Assange was driven to Stansted airport and boarded a flight bound for Australia. 

His wife, Stella Assange, expressed gratitude to supporters who have backed him throughout the years.The plea hearing is scheduled to take place in a US federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands later this week. 

This development marks a significant turning point in Assange’s long-running legal battle, which began with the publication of classified US military documents and diplomatic communications concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

While the deal has not yet been formally finalized, it appears to bring an end to the US government’s extensive pursuit of Assange and allows him to return to his home country.

One of the first major publications by Assange and WikiLeaks was a 238-page 2003 Army manual on “standard operating procedures” for the Camp Delta prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, published in November 2007. The manual showed that it was the army’s policy to keep some prisoners safe from Red Cross inspectors and to keep them in solitary confinement for two weeks in order to make them more docile to interrogators.

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In 2010, WikiLeaks published a trove of classified documents on US military action. He published more than 90,000 documents related to Afghanistan and later published more than 400,000 documents from the Iraq War. The documents included information about civilian deaths, the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iran’s support for militants in Iraq.

Finally, between November 2010 and September 2011, Wikileaks published more than 250,000 unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables dating from December 1966 to February 2010 were published as part of what has been called “Cablegate.”

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