Julian Assange was released.
After a years-long legal saga, Wikileaks announced that its founder has left the United Kingdom after reaching a settlement with US authorities.
Under the agreement, Assange must plead guilty to criminal charges to avoid being extradited to the United States and will be released.
Wikileaks said in X that Assange left Belmarsh prison in London on Monday after 1,901 days held in a small cell.
Previously, Assange had spent seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
In the last five years, Assange was fighting extradition to the United States.
According to the US network CBS, Assange will not spend time in US custody and will receive credit for the time he spent imprisoned in the United Kingdom.
Assange, 52, will return to Australia, according to a letter from the US justice department.
The accusations
Assange was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information in 2010 and 2011.
For years, the United States has argued that the Wikileaks files, which revealed information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, put lives in danger.
Assange founded the Wikileaks website in 2006, which claims to have published more than 10 million documents, including many confidential or restricted official reports related to war, espionage and corruption.
In 2019, the United States Department of Justice described this disclosure as “one of the largest leaks of classified information in the history” of that country.
Lawyers for US authorities said the release of the information had put identified people in Afghanistan and Iraq at “risk of serious harm, torture or even death.”
Assange insisted that the files exposed serious abuses by the US military and that the case against him was politically motivated.
He was accused of conspiring to break into military databases to obtain confidential information and was charged 18 counts of conspiracy crimes to receive national defense information, obtain and disclose national defense information, and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
Wikileaks disclosed approximately 75,000 reports of significant activities related to the war in Afghanistan, 400,000 reports of significant activities related to the Iraq war, 800 evaluation reports of detainees in Guantánamo prison and 250,000 cables from the United States Department of State, from according to the indictment document against Assange.
The US extradition request was accepted after a series of court hearings, and Assange spent the last five years fighting to overturn the decision.
If convicted in the US, he would have faced up to 175 years in prison.
Attack from a helicopter
One of the most notable leaks occurred in 2010, when he published a video filmed from a US military helicopter that showed the massacre of 18 civilians in Baghdad, Iraq.
A voice in the recording urged the pilots to “burn them all” and from the helicopter shots were fired at people in the street.
When a van arrived at the scene to pick up the wounded, it was also shot.
Reuters news agency photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh were killed in the attack.
US military intelligence
Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of documents that were leaked by former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
Documents related to the war in Afghanistan revealed how the US army had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents.
Other Iraq War documents revealed that 66,000 civilians had diedmore than previously reported.
The documents also showed that Iraqi forces had tortured prisoners.
Thousands of messages sent by American diplomats revealed that the United States wanted to collect “biographical and biometric” information – including iris scans, DNA samples and fingerprints – from key UN officials.
Other leaks made by Wikileaks
Wikileaks published around 573,000 messages intercepted and sent during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in United States.
The messages include relatives of victims writing to their loved ones and the reaction to the attacks on government facilities.
“The president has been diverted, he will not return to Washington but I am not sure where he will go,” one message said.
Wikileaks also published thousands of emails hacked from the account of the Hillary Clinton campaign managerJohn Podesta, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
In the emails, Podesta called Clinton’s election rival Bernie Sanders a “fool” for criticizing the Paris climate change agreement.
The emails also suggested that a CNN contributor tipped off the Clinton campaign about a question that was going to be asked during a debate hosted by the station.
The timing of the leaks led to accusations that Wikileaks was deliberately trying to discredit Clinton.
The site also published leaked information from Republican Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email accounts in 2008.
In 2008, Wikileaks published the names, addresses and contact information of more than 13,000 members of the British National Party.
The political party’s manifesto proposed banning immigration from Muslim countries and encouraging some UK residents to return to “their lands of ethnic origin”.
The Sony Pictures hack
In 2015, a leak of more than 170,000 emails and 20,000 documents from the Sony Pictures film studio.
The entertainment company suffered a cyberattack weeks before premiering The Interview (“A Crazy Interview”), a film that made fun of North Korea.
Emails revealed that actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid less than their male co-stars in American Hustle (“American Hustle” or “American Hustle”).
There were also messages from producers and executives insulting celebrities like Angelina Jolie.
And Leonardo DiCaprio was described as “despicable” for turning down a role in a Sony Pictures film.
Assange said the emails They were of public interest because they showed the internal workings of a multinational companyly were “at the center of a geopolitical conflict.”
A “very long” process
After being released on Monday, Assagne’s wife, Stella Assange, who is also his lawyer, tweeted thanks to his followers “who have mobilized for years and years to make this a reality.”
The agreement under which he was released and which will allow him to plead guilty to one charge is expected, will close in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, June 26.
The remote Pacific Islands, an American community, are much closer to Australia than the American federal courts in Hawaii or the mainland United States.
The AFP news agency cited a Australian government spokesperson saying the case had “prolonged too long.”
Both Assagne and his lawyers had long claimed that the case against him was politically motivated.
Assange also faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denied.
Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019, saying too much time had passed since the original complaint, but then UK authorities stopped it.
He was tried in this country for not surrendering to court to be extradited to Sweden.
Even amid lengthy legal battles, Assange has rarely been seen in public and has reportedly suffered from health problems for years, including a minor stroke in prison in 2021.
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