After a 14-year odyssey Julian Assange lands in Australia
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has returned to his Australian homeland after a 14-year legal odyssey.
26.06.2024, 13:25
26.06.2024, 19:06
SDA
The Bombardier charter plane with the 52-year-old on board landed in the capital Canberra on Wednesday evening (local time), as data from the "Flightradar24" platform showed.
The flight number VJT199, which Assange's wife Stella and Wikileaks had previously mentioned on social media, had been the connection most followed by users worldwide for days. Thousands of people followed the landing live on social networks.
Assange had already flown from London via Bangkok to the Mariana Island of Saipan, a US territory in the Western Pacific, on Monday. After he was officially released by a court there on Wednesday morning, he immediately made his way home. According to observers, he will now make his first public statement on the legal deal with the US authorities.
A court on Saipan had previously approved the deal. In return for a partial guilty plea regarding American espionage allegations, Assange was credited with his five-year prison sentence in the UK. He is now a free man. Since 2010, Wikileaks had published secret material from US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
