The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, accused of spying, is to be set free after admitting to spreading confidential information and reaching an agreement with the US Department of Justice.
The Australian has landed on American territory, where he is expected to plead guilty during the night.
Around 1 am on Wednesday, Swedish time, Julian Assange is to appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, an American autonomous territory in the Pacific Ocean.
At 22.30 on Tuesday, he landed on the island group after a long flight from London.
In the capital Saipan, he is to admit to having illegally received and disseminated classified national defence information, according to an American Department of Justice document.
According to the agreement, Assange is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, which corresponds to the time he has already spent in prison in the UK.
The document reveals that the US expects Assange to return to his home country, Australia, after his court appearance.
Free man
He will become a "free man" when an American judge has signed the agreement, which is expected to take place during the night, says his wife Stella Assange to BBC.
He will be a free man when it has been signed... and it will happen sometime tomorrow, she says on Tuesday.
"Julian Assange is free. He left the high-security Belmarsh prison on the morning of 24 June after spending 1,901 days there", writes WikiLeaks in a post on X.
The organisation also highlights that the negotiations for his release have been ongoing for a "long period" and stresses that the agreement has not yet been formally approved.
Seven years at the embassy
On Tuesday morning, Stella Assange published a short video clip on X, showing her husband boarding a plane. In another post on X, she writes that Julian Assange will be liable for around 500,000 US dollars for the flight from London to Australia.
Assange has been charged by the US for his role in the 2010 leak of around 700,000 classified documents, which relate to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 52-year-old has been imprisoned in Belmarsh prison in London since April 2019. He was arrested after spending seven years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, due to allegations of sexual offences during a visit to Stockholm. The Swedish investigation was dropped in 2019.
Julian Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia.
As a teenager, he became known as a hacker under the name Mendax, who, together with others, broke into the Pentagon's and NASA's computer systems.
In 2006, he co-founded WikiLeaks, a website where large leaks could be submitted and published. Among the hundreds of thousands of confidential documents published were evidence of American war crimes and human rights abuses.
His supporters see him as a freedom of speech champion, while critics point out that the publications he has made have endangered US security.
