A long legal battle involving Julian Assange appears to be finally reaching its end after the founder of the Wikileaks website agreed to a deal with American authorities.
He had been fighting against extradition to the US where he was accused of disclosing military secrets.
Under the deal, he will plead guilty to one criminal charge and go free.
What did Julian Assange do?
Mr Assange ran Wikileaks, a website that published many confidential or restricted official reports related to war, spying, and corruption.
In 2010, it released a video from a US military helicopter that showed civilians being killed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
It also published thousands of confidential documents supplied by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These suggested that the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan.
The revelations became a huge story, prompting reaction from all corners of the globe, and led to intense scrutiny of American involvement in foreign conflicts.
The US said the leaks had endangered the lives of American personnel.
Mr Assange was accused of conspiring to break into its military databases to acquire sensitive information and was charged with 18 offenses.
Efforts were made to bring him to the US for prosecution – which he fought for 14 years in some of the world’s highest courts.
Mr Assange has always argued that he exposed serious abuses by US armed forces and that the case against him was politically motivated.
Who is Julian Assange?
Born in Australia, Mr Assange gained a reputation for computer programming as a teenager. In 1995, he was fined for hacking offenses.
He also dabbled in academia – co-writing a bestselling book on the emerging, subversive side of the internet, before studying physics and maths.
In 2010 – the year Wikileaks released the footage of US soldiers shooting dead Iraqi civilians – Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Mr Assange, accusing him of having raped one woman and molested another.
This marked the start of Mr Assange’s 14-year legal battle.
He was detained in the UK and denied the claims against him, arguing that they were a ploy to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges over the Wikileaks disclosures.
In 2012, he claimed asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London – having found sympathy for his cause from the country’s then-president.
Mr Assange spent seven years in the embassy and was regularly visited by celebrity supporters including the singer Lady Gaga and the actor Pamela Anderson.
He was ordered to leave the building by a later Ecuadorean president, was arrested by UK police, and went on to spend five years in a British prison as he continued efforts to fight extradition to the US.
In November 2019, the Swedish authorities dropped the case against Mr. Assange because they said too much time had passed since the alleged offenses.
