WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has flown out of the UK after he reached a plea deal with US prosecutors, 12 years after he fled to Ecuador’s embassy to avoid a sex crime probe.
Assange, persecuted for over a decade over allegations he hacked the US government, today left HMP Belmarsh in London and flew out of the country on a flight from Stansted at 5pm today, according to WikiLeaks.
Footage published by WikiLeaks to X purportedly showed Assange travelling in a car to Stansted Airport, before cutting to him boarding the plane at the travel hub.
The hacktivist group said today: ‘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.’
His reported flight out of the country came after US prosecutors filed criminal paperwork against Assange, 52, typically a preliminary step before a plea deal.
In the agreement, prosecutors will look for a 62-month sentence – the same amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while fighting extradition to the US.
The plea deal still needs to be approved by a federal judge – but if approved, it would give him credit for time served.
In recent months, President Joe Biden has hinted at a possible deal being pushed by officials in the Australian government to return Assange to back to his homeland.
The deal outlines a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
WikiLeaks in 2010 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 swaths of diplomatic cables.
Assange had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the data breach. It carried a maximum of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full.
Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump‘s administration over WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Officials in the US had alleged that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered US diplomatic cables.
The cables were not only embarrassing but more importantly potentially endangered confidential sources. Many contained top secret information regarding Iraq war-related activity reports and information related to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of Wikileaks should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech.
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped.
He fled to Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail.
He has been in London’s Belmarsh top security jail ever since, from where he has for almost five years been fighting extradition to the United States.
While in Belmarsh he married his partner Stella with whom he had two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.
