Julian Assange returns home to Australia a free man

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned home to Australia a free man Wednesday after pleading guilty in a deal that ended his yearslong legal battle over the publication of U.S. military secrets.

Assange’s plane, tracked online by thousands, touched down in the Australian capital of Canberra at 7:37 p.m. (5:37 a.m. ET), data from the flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 showed.

He embraced his wife and father and raised his clenched fist in salute to his cheering supporters.

“Free at last,” WikiLeaks said in a post on X.

It was the end of a round-the-world journey that began Monday when Assange left Britain, where he had spent more than five years in prison as he fought extradition to the United States.

Assange, 52, flew on a chartered plane to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth north of Guam, where on Wednesday morning he pleaded guilty under the U.S. Espionage Act to a single criminal count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.

His guilty plea was the final chapter in a legal saga that began more than a decade ago, when he published a trove of classified documents that embarrassed several governments and which the U.S. government says threatened national security and aided adversaries.