He “enemy number one” USA to some and a legend to others, Julian Assange was released after reaching an agreement with American justice that essentially ends the lengthy legal battle and allows him to return to Australia.

It was a portal that he himself founded, WikiLeaksthe man responsible for the announcement on Tuesday on his X account that Assange was leaving the maximum security British prison where he had been held for five years, leaving the United Kingdom to return to his country.

“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, having spent 1,901 days there,” said a statement published on the night of June 24.

The release became possible after Assange, 52, reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice that The long legal saga over the leak of secret documents comes to an endand it will come to a full conclusion once he appears in court on Wednesday in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean, and then heads to Australia.

Julian Assange – hero or villain?

Assange’s journey from hacker to anti-powerbroker is part of a broader battle over freedom of speech for journalists and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International.

Although the Australian was not convicted of any crime, he passed almost fourteen years of captivity in the United Kingdom, for the last five years in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison.

Initially detained in 2010 at the request of Sweden. In connection with the case, which has now been archived, Assange was undercover at the Ecuadorian embassy in London from June 19, 2012 until his expulsion and arrest in April 2019 at the request of the United States, which triggered the current trial.

During his time on the diplomatic mission, he met the Spanish-Swedish Sara Gonzalez Devant, who was part of his legal team and changed her name to Stella, with whom he had two children in 2017 (Gabriel) and 2019 (Max), the existence of which she was revealed in 2020, starting a public campaign for his release.

Great and unpredictable

Born in Townsville (Australia). July 3, 1971Assange, with his pale skin and distinctive white hair, remains a mystery even to his colleagues, who describe him as charismatic, intelligent but unpredictable.

The programmer, who is said to have spent hours at work without washing, eating or sleeping, spent his childhood in Australia, where his mother, artist Christine Anne, moved constantly to escape her younger brother’s father, who was vying for custody. .

As a young man, he was prosecuted in this country for computer crimes for accessing, with his group International Subversives, the secure systems of official organizations, but succeeded with only a fine when the judge found that his activities were motivated by curiosity rather than criminal purposes. . .

As a teenager, he married a woman with whom he had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software developer, in 1989.

In the mid-nineties, Assange worked as a free software programmer on encryption programs for Linux and contributed to Suelette Dreyfus’s book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), in which he explained his philosophy of not damaging computer systems. which he gained access to.

After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne (although he did not graduate), he co-founded WikiLeaks in 2006 with the mission of revealing government information that he believed should be available to citizens.

This came to light when WikiLeaks published in April 2010 the controversial video posted by former US soldier Chelsea Manning showing US troops shooting civilians in Iraq in 2007, as well as other alleged atrocities in Afghanistan and 250,000 diplomatic cables that delivered the world is in an awkward position. leaders.

The revelations were treated by the US as crimes of espionage and computer hacking, although their defense considered the charges to be politically motivated.

Controversial, courageous and persistent, Assange has also dedicated himself, among other things, to helping supporters of Catalan independence in the face of the 2017 referendum, which was declared illegal by Spanish justice.

A few hours after his announced return to Australia and during a technical layover in Bangkok, WikiLeaks today published in X Magazine a photo of Assange looking hopefully out the window of the plane he is flying in: “We’re getting closer to freedom”highlights the comment.

EFE