Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was free to depart the UK on Monday after entering into a plea agreement with US authorities about the spy charges that have plagued him for over ten years.
In a court hearing on a small US-controlled Pacific island in the coming hours, Assange, 52, is anticipated to enter a guilty plea to a single espionage charge. Prosecutors will seek a sentence equal to time served.
Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh prison for five years. WikiLeaks released a video of him being taken to Stansted Airport. After that, he got on a private plane that made a landing in Bangkok, Thailand, for fuel.
Assange has been a wanted man since 2010 when WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history – along with swathes of diplomatic cables.
In 2012, as authorities circled him for that and over ‘credible and reliable’ sex crime allegations from a woman in Sweden, he fled into London’s Ecuadorian embassy where he remained for seven years in often farcical circumstances.
After falling out with the South American nation’s rulers he was dragged out of his bolthole in 2019 and locked up in Belmarsh while the US attempted to extradite him.
But that legal process ended abruptly yesterday, and WikiLeaks broke the news with a post on X reading: ‘Julian Assange is free!’
In a pre-recorded video filmed outside Belmarsh prison, Assange’s wife Stella and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said: ‘If you’re seeing this, it means he is out.’
The group said: ‘After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.’
Assange married Stella, a South African-born lawyer who he met when she joined his legal team in 2011, while locked up in Belmarsh in 2022. Last night she posted on X: ‘Julian is free!!!! Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU – yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU.’
Both of the couple’s children were conceived during his time at the Ecuadorian embassy. Stella posted a photo of her husband video calling her from Stansted airport on Monday morning on X on Tuesday morning.
Although it appears that he has been granted permission to depart the UK and return to Australia, British authorities have not yet verified his release. For comments, MailOnline has reached out to the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom.
This is very good news. It never made sense to put Julian Assange in jail in the first place. He presented the reality of what our global governments are doing openly.
The entire situation has been a farce, demonstrating the US government’s retaliatory nature when found to be lying, and in case you haven’t noticed, the Americans can be quite vindictive. They don’t care too much about justice, just getting even, and then some.
Julian Assange told the truth, and he exposed more than just war crimes. He published emails and had proof, and he was persecuted for it, but really, they were exposed because they put sensitive information into emails – not very clever.
He endured unimaginable suffering and has been duly punished for his audacity in exposing high-level wrongdoing.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 