WikiLeaks founder Assange freed in US plea deal

SAIPAN

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned home to Australia to start life as a free man on Wednesday after admitting he revealed U.S. defense secrets in a deal that unlocked the door to his London prison cell.

Assange landed on a chilly Canberra evening in a private jet, the final stage of an international drama that led him from a five-year stretch in the high-security Belmarsh prison in Britain to a courtroom in a U.S. Pacific island territory and, finally, home.

Assange, who from 2010 published hundreds of thousands of confidential U.S. documents on the whistleblowing website, was released this week from a high-security British prison.

The 52-year-old traveled to the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific U.S. territory, to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information.

He was sentenced on Wednesday to five years and two months in prison, but credited for the same amount of time he spent behind bars in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States.

"You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man," the judge told Assange, adding she hoped the deal would restore some "peace" to him after his incarceration.

Assange has become a hero to free speech campaigners and a villain to those who thought he had endangered U.S. security and intelligence sources.

"Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide material that was said to be classified," Assange, dressed in a black suit with a brown tie and his hair slicked back, told the court.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday he was "very pleased" that Assange's long legal "saga" ended.

"I am very pleased that on this occasion, this has been a successful outcome that I believe overwhelmingly Australians did want to see," Albanese told parliament.

"They will have different views about the engagement and the activities of Mr Assange but they will be pleased that the saga has been brought to an end and that he will be able to reunite with his family."