LThe private plane transporting him landed on Wednesday evening at Canberra airport, where dozens of journalists were present, an AFP team noted. His white hair pulled back, the Australian raised his fist as he emerged from the plane, then strode onto the tarmac to kiss his wife Stella, lifting her off the ground, then his father.
“He is delighted to come home. He marvels just by looking at the horizon“, Stella Assange told ABC, adding that their two children had “jumped for joy on the couch” upon hearing the news. Previously she explained in a press conference that her husband needed privacy and time to recover after more than five years spent in a high security prison in London.
“He needs time, he needs to recover and it’s a whole processshe said, seeming on the verge of tears. I’m asking you to please give us space, give us privacy, let us find our place, let our family be family before he can speak again, at time of his choice.”
“Julian needs to recover, that’s the priority. And it’s a fact that Julian will always defend human rights, will always defend victims, because that’s how he is.”, according to Ms. Assange. A lawyer for Julian Assange, Jen Robinson, said the Wikileaks founder spoke to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when the plane landed and “told the Prime Minister that he had saved his life”.
Earlier in the day, Julian Assange, 52, was released after a quick hearing at the US federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands. Mr. Assange will not be allowed to return to the United States without authorization, the US Department of Justice said. Under the agreement, the former computer scientist, accused of making hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents public in the 2010s, pleaded guilty to obtaining and disclosing national defense information.
“I encouraged my source”, the American soldier Chelsea Manning, at the origin of this massive leak, “to provide material that was classified”, recognized Julian Assange on Wednesday at the bar, tired, but visibly relaxed. American diplomacy estimated Wednesday via a spokesperson that it had, by disseminating these documents, put “danger” “opposition leaders, human rights activists from around the world”. He then promptly boarded a plane that left the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, for Canberra.
His father John Shipton, in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC, confided his “joie”, because his son will be able “spending quality time with his wife Stella and two children” and enjoy “all the beauty of ordinary life”. “I’m grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end”, reacted his mother Christine Assange in a press release.
Julian Assange “suffered enormously in his fight for freedom of expression, freedom of the press”, underlined Barry Pollack, his other lawyer. “The work of WikiLeaks will continue and Mr. Assange, I have no doubt, will vigorously continue his fight”. The Australian Prime Minister, welcoming a “positive result” what “the vast majority of Australians wanted”, explained that secret negotiations carried out by Australian intermediaries sent to the United States had helped to forge the agreement which led to the release.
The whistleblower left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, after accepting the principle of a guilty plea. Under the terms of this agreement, he was only prosecuted for the sole charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information”, for which he was sentenced to 62 months in prison, already covered by his five years of pre-trial detention.
Ms. Assange appealed for donations to pay the 520,000 dollars (485,000 euros) that her husband must reimburse the Australian government for the charter of the plane which brought him to Australia, because he did not “not allowed to take a commercial flightThe Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Julian Assange’s refusal to travel to the US mainland.
The United Nations welcomed the outcome of an affair which had raised “a range of human rights concerns”. American justice was pursuing him for having made public since 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among them, a video showing civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. Targeted by 18 charges, Julian Assange faced theory up to 175 years in prison. Chelsea Manning, sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison by a court martial, was released after seven years after her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
The founder of WikiLeaks was arrested by British police in April 2019, after seven years spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, dismissed the same year.
