WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sealed a plea deal with the US Justice Department here today and secured his freedom.

Assange, who has been imprisoned for the past five years in a maximum security British jail, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of publishing US military secrets, particularly the Pentagon’s military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, in 2010-2011.

The Australian journalist, who has fought extradition to the northern country all this time, appeared at today’s scheduled hearing in this capital of the largest island of the Northern Marianas, a US community in the western Pacific.

The location, although it seems like something out of a movie script, is the end of the legal soap opera to which Assange was subjected because of a years-long persecution for asserting through WikiLeaks the right to information.

The Justice Department agreed to hold the hearing in the Northern Mariana Islands because of Assange’s opposition to entering the US mainland and because he will literally be on his way home to Australia.

Prior to his captivity in London, the WikiLeaks founder spent seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the British capital (2012-2019) to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was accused of rape and sexual assault, something he always denied.

Assange arrived on Saipan Island the day before «to formalise the plea deal that should never have taken place», WikiLeaks reported on the social networking site X.

The international community reacted with joy after hearing the news of the release of the WikiLeaks founder, who will turn 53 on 3 July and who, had he been extradited to the United States, faced the possibility of a prison sentence of nearly two centuries.

A guilty plea to the aforementioned offence would carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, but in this case five years were handed down, which is in line with the time Assange spent in the British prison in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated for 23 hours a day.