Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison in the UK as part of a plea deal with the US government.
The 52-year-old – who came to the international spotlight in 2010 after publishing a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning – was today freed from the high security Belmarsh jail in London.
For years, the US has argued that the hundreds of thousands of classified military documents – which disclosed information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – endangered lives.
The activist was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information amid what has been the largest security breach of its kind in the US military history.
Footage of Assange published on X in the early hours of this morning shows his departure from Belmarsh where he had been locked away for the past five years.
He is headed towards Stansted Airport where he boarded a private charter plane.
It is understood that the Australian national has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.
In return, Assange will walk free and return to his country after years in self-exile.
This expected to take place in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands tomorrow morning.
It is a moment his supporters have been waiting for after 14 years of legal battles, campaigns and diplomatic tensions for him and his family.
Who is Julian Assange and what is Wikileaks?
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Assange is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded Wikileaks in 2006.
He became interested in computers and mathematics at a young age and by the early 90s he was considered one of his nation’s best hackers.
His website rose to prominence in April 2010 when it published a classified video showing a 2007 US helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Wikileaks then released more than 90,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan, and about 400,000 secret US files on the Iraq war.
It also leaked 250,000 secret diplomatic cables from US embassies that made it to the front pages of newspapers.
The group returned to the spotlight ahead of the 2016 US presidential election when it published tens of thousands of emails belonging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairperson.
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