WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange is to be a “free man,” his wife said yesterday, once a judge signs off on a plea deal with US authorities to bring his years-long legal drama to a close.
Assange was released on Monday from a high-security British prison where he had been held for five years while he fought extradition to the US, which sought to prosecute him for revealing military secrets.
He flew out of London to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific where he is to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a court document said.
Photo: EPA-EFE / WikiLeaks
A charter plane carrying the 52-year-old landed in Bangkok at about 12:30pm yesterday for a scheduled refueling stop.
From there it was scheduled to fly to Saipan, capital of the US territory where Assange is due in court today.
He is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the same amount of time he spent behind bars in Britain.
Assange’s wife, Stella, said he would be a “free man” after the judge signed off on the deal, thanking supporters who have campaigned for his release for years.
“I’m just elated. Frankly, it’s just incredible,” she told BBC radio.
She urged supporters to monitor her husband’s flight on plane-tracking Web sites and to follow the “AssangeJet” hashtag, saying in a post on social media platform X “we need all eyes on his flight in case something goes wrong.”
The court in the Northern Mariana Islands was chosen because of Assange’s unwillingness to go to the continental US and because of the territory’s proximity to his native Australia, a court filing said.
Under the deal, Assange is due to return to Australia, where the government said his case had “dragged on for too long” and there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”
WikiLeaks posted a video on X showing Assange looking out of the window as the private jet landed in Bangkok, then stepping off the plane onto the tarmac.
Assange was wanted by Washington for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret US documents from 2010 as head of the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks.
Since then he has become a hero to free speech campaigners and a villain to those who thought he endangered US security and intelligence sources.
The UN hailed Assange’s release, saying the case had raised “a series of human rights concerns.”
However, former US vice president Mike Pence slammed the plea deal on X as a “miscarriage of justice” that “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces.”
CIVILIAN SIGHTING: Fishers from Penghu County took a photograph of a Chinese guided-missile destroyer near the median line of the Taiwan Strait China sent 77 military aircraft around Taiwan over a two-day period ending yesterday morning, an uptick in its activity over the past few weeks. Forty-one Chinese military aircraft were detected in the vicinity of Taiwan in the 24-hour period that ended at 6am yesterday, with 23 crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait and nine crossing its extension, entering the country’s northern, southwestern and eastern air defense identification zones (ADIZs), flight routes released yesterday by the Ministry of National Defense showed. Of the nine aircraft that crossed the median line’s extension, were seven fighter jets and two drones that flew around
ESCALATING TENSIONS: The US called for restraint and meaningful dialogue after Beijing threatened Taiwanese independence advocates with the death sentence The US on Monday condemned China’s “escalatory and destabilizing language and actions” toward Taiwan after Beijing last week announced new guidelines to punish supporters of Taiwanese independence. Asked about the guidelines, which included the death sentence for “diehard” independence advocates, US Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller said: “We strongly condemn the escalatory and destabilizing language and actions from PRC [People’s Republic of China] officials.” “We continue to urge restraint and no unilateral change to the status quo,” he said at the press briefing. The US urges China to “engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan,” Miller said, adding that “threats and legal
UNDER THE RADAR: Two US deputy assistant state secretaries visited Taiwan and met with foreign diplomats to discuss how to boost the nation’s international participation US officials who visited Taiwan earlier this week met with foreign representatives and told them that UN Resolution 2758 does not involve Taiwan nor should it be conflated with China’s “one China” principle, sources said yesterday. UN Resolution 2758 recognized the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of China in 1971. Beijing has been misrepresenting it to exclude Taiwan from the international organization and its affiliates. A representative to Taiwan, requesting anonymity, quoted the US officials as saying during a meeting that as long as it is not specified in UN Resolution 2758, “everything is feasible” with regard to
DEATH THREAT: A MAC official said that it has urged Beijing to avoid creating barriers that would impede exchanges across the Strait, but it continues to do so People should avoid unnecessary travel to China after Beijing issued 22 guidelines allowing its courts to try in absentia and sentence to death “Taiwan independence separatists,” the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday as it raised its travel alert for China, including Hong Kong and Macau, to “orange.” The guidelines published last week “severely threaten the personal safety of Taiwanese traveling to China, Hong Kong and Macau,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesman Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told a news conference in Taipei. “Following a comprehensive assessment, the government considers it necessary to elevate the travel alert to orange from yellow,” Liang said. Beijing has