Home minister says eight nabbed for suspected terrorism a concern for spreading caliphate ideology, made police their No 1 target
His release ends a 14-year legal saga in which Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, battling extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges. Chief US District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted his guilty plea and released him due to time already served in a British jail.
Assange, 52, left the court through a throng of TV cameras and photographers without answering questions, then waved as he got into a white SUV. The US territory in the western Pacific was chosen due to his opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
“I watch this and think how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls of his high security Belmarsh prison cell,” Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks founder said on social media platform X.