Listen to Story WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange landed in Australia on Wednesday to an ecstatic welcome after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that sets him free from a 14-year legal battle. Assange disembarked from a private jet at Canberra airport just after 7:30 pm (1130 GMT), waving to waiting media before passionately kissing his wife, Stella, and lifting her off the ground. He embraced his father before entering the terminal building with his legal team.
His arrival ends a 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 Sweden on sexual assault allegations and to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges. Those charges stemmed from WikiLeaks' release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - one of the largest breaches of secret information in US history. During a three-hour hearing held earlier in the US territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents but said he had believed the US Constitution's First Amendment, which protects free speech, shielded his activities.
"Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information," he told the court. "I believed the First Amendment protected.
