Beni Mellal – Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is set to be freed after pleading guilty to a single charge under the US Espionage Act, ending a 14-year legal battle.
The plea deal will be formalized in a US court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Pacific, on Wednesday.
Assange, 52, left London’s Belmarsh prison on Monday after spending nearly five years in custody. He boarded a private jet and flew to Bangkok for refueling before heading to the Pacific island for his court appearance.
As part of the plea deal, Assange will receive credit for the time he has already served in the UK and will not face additional prison time in the US.
The charges against Assange stemmed from WikiLeaks’ 2010 release of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as diplomatic cables.
The release of these documents sparked controversy and led to scrutiny of US involvement in foreign conflicts.
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Assange had been resisting extradition to the US and had previously spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid being sent to Sweden over separate sexual assault allegations, which were later dropped.
Reacting to the plea deal, Assange’s wife, Stella, expressed her delight and thanked supporters for their efforts. She stated that the priority for her husband now is to regain his health and spend time with his family in privacy.
The plea deal has been met with mixed reactions. Some have criticized it as a miscarriage of justice, while others, including the United Nations, have welcomed the move as a significant step towards settling the case.
Assange’s legal team and supporters had long maintained that the charges against him were politically motivated. The breakthrough in the case reportedly came after the UK High Court began considering Assange’s constitutional protections under the freedom of the press act.
After the court proceedings in the Northern Mariana Islands, Assange is expected to return to his home country of Australia.
