WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange landed on American soil on Tuesday evening. He was brought before a court in Saipan on the autonomous US Mariana Islands group in the Pacific Ocean.
On Wednesday night, he pleaded guilty to disseminating classified national defense information.
According to the agreement, Assange is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, which corresponds to the time he has already been imprisoned in the UK.
Assange will now fly to his native Australia. His flight is expected to depart at four in the morning Swedish time, Wikileaks announces on X.
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Julian Assange about to board a plane at Stansted Airport in London on Monday, a photo taken by his organization Wikileaks shows. Photo: Wikileaks via AFP/TT
Spent seven years at the Embassy of Ecuador
Assange co-founded Wikileaks, a website where large leaks could be transmitted and published. He was indicted by the United States for his role in the 2010 leaks of hundreds of thousands of classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2012, he was granted asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was suspected of a sex crime. That investigation was closed in 2019 and the same year he was thrown out of the embassy and arrested by British police.
And until Tuesday, he spent five years in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he also contested extradition to the United States.
US President Joe Biden said in April that the country was “considering” a request from Australia to drop the charges against Assange.