WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrived in his hometown of Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a protracted legal battle. Assange landed in Saipan on a charter jet after departing from a London prison. He then continued to the Australian capital, Canberra, on the same aircraft later that day. His South African lawyer wife, Stella Assange, the mother of his two children, had been in Australia for days awaiting her husband’s release.
The case concluded abruptly with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange’s native Australia and agreed to his plan to avoid entering the continental United States.
Assange was a respondent in a case that involved him receiving and publishing thousands of diplomatic correspondences that included details of U.S. military misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Press freedom advocates threw their support behind him, for bringing to light, military crimes that might otherwise have been covered up. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 hapless people, including two journalists with Reuters.
Assange was accompanied on the flights by Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Stephen Smith, who played critical roles in negotiating his release with London and Washington.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the flights were paid for by the “Assange team,”, saying his government played a role in facilitating the transport.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Parliament that Assange’s freedom, after five years in a British prison fighting extradition to the U.S., was the result of his government’s “careful, patient and determined work.”
Assange’s next move is not clear yet, but one of his lawyers, Barry Pollack, expected his client to continue vocal campaigning.
The plea bargain, disclosed Monday night in a thinly detailed Justice Department letter, represents the latest and final chapter in a court fight involving the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but criticised by national security hawks who insist that his conduct put lives at risks and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism duties.