Julian Assange left the British high-security prison where he was being held in the morning and has already left the United Kingdom with the aim of returning to Australia, as announced by the WikiLeaks portal on its X account. “Julian Assange is free. He left the prison of maximum security at Belmarsh on the morning of June 24, after having spent 1,901 days there,” WikiLeaks reports in X.
The portal assures that Assange, 52 years old and of Australian nationality, “was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and left the United Kingdom.” “After more than five years in a 2×3 meter cell, isolated 23 hours a daywill soon be reunited with his wife Stella Assange and his children, who have only known their father behind bars,” states the portal, which concludes its message on X by saying: “Julian’s freedom is our freedom.”
WikiLeaks also published a video in which Assange is seen, with white hair combed back, looking through some papers and then walking up the stairs of an airplane.
WikiLeaks’ announcement comes after it was revealed in court documents that Assange reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice that will allow him to return to Australia and end a long judicial saga over the leak of classified documents.
Assange will appear Wednesday in a court in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean, to finalize that agreement with the Justice Department. The American justice had accused Assange of up to 18 crimes for violating the Espionage Act due to one of the largest leaks of classified information in the history of the United States in 2010, which revealed secrets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as data about the detainees at the Guantanamo base, among other matters.
According to the agreement reached with the Department of Justice, Assange will plead guilty during a court hearing on Wednesday to a single count of conspiring to illegally obtain and disseminate classified information. The appearance will be held in a court in the Mariana Islands, due to Assange’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States and the court’s proximity to Australia, according to a Justice Department letter filed with the court.
According to the agreement, which must still be approved by a judge, Assange would only be sentenced to 62 months in prison, equivalent to the time he has already served in the high-security Belmarsh prison.. Organizations defending press freedom have been calling for Assange’s release for years and his wife, Stella, has been leading a campaign in her defense with the participation of celebrities and political figures.
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Source: Lasexta

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