‘Generational hero’: Julian Assange’s supporters hail his expected release

WikiLeaks founder’s supporters welcome likely end of his 14-year legal ordeal, but say he should never have been imprisoned in the first place.

Activists, politicians and journalists around the world have welcomed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s expected return home to Australia, following a deal with prosecutors in the United States in which he agreed to plead guilty to a single count of violating the country’s espionage law.

Assange, 52, was released on Monday from prison in the United Kingdom, where he was being held as he fought extradition to the US, and was seen boarding a plane at Stansted airport north of London in a video circulated by WikiLeaks.

Assange is scheduled to appear at a court in Saipan, a US Pacific territory at 9am on Wednesday (23:00 GMT on Tuesday), where he will be sentenced to 62 months of time already served.

Supporters of the WikiLeaks founder welcomed the expected end to Assange’s nearly 14-year legal drama, with some hailing him as “a hero for the ages” and others noting he should never have been imprisoned in the first place.

Assange, who spent seven years holed up in Ecuador’s London Embassy from 2012 to 2019 to avoid extradition to Sweden on separate charges of sexual assault, was indicted by the administration of former US President Donald Trump in 2019 over WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents. These included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at crowds in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two staff from the Reuters news agency.