BANGKOK (AP) — A plane carrying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange left Bangkok on Tuesday after refueling, taking him to Saipan to negotiate a deal with the U.S. government that would secure his release and settle a lengthy legal battle over the publication of a trove of secret documents.
The charter flight from London, which Assange’s wife Stella confirmed her husband was on board, left Don Mueang International Airport, according to aircraft tracking app Flightradar24. The official WikiLeaks account on X said Assange was en route to Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. state in the Pacific, where he is due to appear in court on Wednesday.
A letter from the U.S. Department of Justice filed with the court said he is expected to plead guilty to conspiracy to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information.
After his confession and conviction, Assange is expected to return to his native Australia. The hearing is being held in Saipan because Assange refuses to travel to the United States and the court is close to Australia, prosecutors said.
British justice officials confirmed that Assange left the UK on Monday evening after being granted bail at a secret hearing last week.
“Thirteen and a half years and two extradition requests after his first arrest, Julian Assange left the UK yesterday after attending a bail hearing last Thursday which, at his request, was held behind closed doors,” said Stephen Parkinson, Attorney General for England and Wales.
In a statement published on X, WikiLeaks said Assange had boarded a plane after leaving the maximum security prison in London where he had spent the past five years.
The deal brings an abrupt end to a criminal case involving international intrigue and a years-long U.S. government persecution of a publisher. His hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a star among press freedom advocates, who praised his work exposing U.S. military misconduct. U.S. prosecutors, however, have repeatedly claimed his actions broke the law and endangered the country’s national security.
Stella Assange told the BBC from Australia that the deal had been “hanging in the balance” for the past 72 hours but she was “delighted” with the news. She is a lawyer who married the WikiLeaks founder in prison in 2022. She said details of the agreement would be made public once the judge signed it.
“He will be a free man once a judge signs this,” she said, adding that she still doesn’t believe it’s true.
She posted on the social media platform X that Assange owed the Australian government $520,000 for the charter flight and asked for donations to finance it.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said the deal for Assange came after increasing engagement from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“This is the result of a long, long process that has been going on for some time. It has been a hard fight but the focus now is on reuniting Julian with his family,” Hrafnsson told the PA news agency.
Albanese told Parliament that an Australian envoy had flown in with Assange from London.
“Regardless of people’s views on Mr Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long,” Albanese said. “Continuing to detain him serves no purpose and we want him returned to Australia.”
The deal ensures that Assange admits his guilt but at the same time spares him additional prison time. He is expected to receive the same sentence he already spent in a British prison while fighting extradition to the US, where he was charged with 17 espionage charges and one count of computer misuse.
The extradition dispute was played out in a series of hearings before London courts.
Last month, Assange was able to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the US government had given him “manifestly inadequate” assurances that he would be afforded the same free speech protections as any American citizen if extradited from Britain.
Assange was hailed by many around the world as a hero who exposed military misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the files released by WikiLeaks was a video of an Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad in 2007 that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
However, his reputation was also tarnished by allegations of sexual misconduct by two women in Sweden, which he denied.
The Justice Department’s indictment, released in 2019, accuses Assange of encouraging and helping U.S. intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military records that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of endangering national security by publishing documents that harmed the U.S. and its allies and helped its opponents.
The case was sharply criticized by members of the press and Assange supporters, with federal prosecutors defending it by arguing that it was conduct that went far beyond information gathering by a journalist and amounted to an attempt to amass, steal and indiscriminately publish secret government documents.
The agreement comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop U.S. efforts to prosecute Assange. The White House was not involved in the decision to settle Assange’s case, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Assange made headlines again in 2016 after he posted on his website emails from Democrats that prosecutors said had been stolen by Russian intelligence officials. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the investigation revealed in detail the role the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election in favor of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
During the Obama administration, Justice Department officials considered bringing charges against Assange, but were unsure whether they would hold up in court and worried that it might be arduous to justify charging him for actions similar to those of a conventional journalist.
Under the Trump administration, however, the attitude changed: in 2017, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions described Assange’s arrest as a priority.
Assange’s family and supporters said his physical and mental health had suffered during the legal battle that had lasted more than a decade.
Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was arrested by British police after the Ecuadorian government stripped him of asylum status in 2019, and then jailed for jumping bail when he first sought refuge in the embassy.
Although Sweden eventually closed its sex crimes investigation because so much time had passed, Assange remained in London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison during the extradition dispute with the United States.
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Tucker reported from Fort Pierce, Florida, and Durkin Richer from Washington. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Napat Kongsawad and David Rising in Bangkok, Jill Lawless and Brian Melley in London and Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.
