Sawt Falasteen - Julian Assange 'rediscovering life' as free man in Australia

The 52-year-old landed in Canberra the night before, hours after pleading guilty in a US Pacific island court to a single count of revealing military secrets.

Under a plea deal, he was sentenced to time already served and allowed to walk free, ending a 14-year legal struggle with the US Department of Justice.

But the jail time had taken a toll.

Assange did not attend a news conference after he touched down, with his wife apparently near tears as she pleaded for family privacy and time for him to recuperate.

"He's just savouring freedom for the first time in 14 years. He needs time to rest and recover. And he is just rediscovering normal life. And he needs space to do that," Stella Assange told reporters Thursday.

"Julian plans to swim in the ocean every day. He plans to sleep in a real bed. He plans to taste real food. And he plans to enjoy his freedom."

- 'Jumping on the sofa' -

The WikiLeaks publisher had yet to see his two children, who were staying elsewhere and had been sleeping when his plane landed, she said.

Stella Assange said she sent her husband a video on the day of his US court hearing showing their children "jumping on the sofa" at the prospect of their father's return.

Assange spent more than five years in London's Belmarsh prison fighting extradition to the United States on charges under the 1917 Espionage Act.

He had already lived for seven years in Ecuador's London embassy to escape extradition to Sweden over sexual assault charges, which were eventually dropped.

The couple have not had time to discuss how their lives will play out since his release, said Stella, who met Assange while he was still in the Ecuadorian embassy and married him in the London prison.

Assange's legal team argues that the US Justice Department's legal pursuit of their client will have a chilling effect on journalism.

They have called for US President Joe Biden to grant him a pardon.

"The president of the United States has absolute pardon power. President Biden or any subsequent president can, and in my mind should, issue a pardon to Julian Assange," said his US trial lawyer Barry Pollack.

- People put in 'danger' -

Assange had published hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents on the WikiLeaks whistleblowing website from 2010.

He became a hero to free speech campaigners but a villain to those who thought he had endangered US security and intelligence sources.

The Australian citizen was indicted by a US federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts stemming from WikiLeaks' publication of a trove of national security documents.

The material he released through WikiLeaks included video showing civilians being killed by fire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007. The victims included a photographer and a driver from Reuters.

On Wednesday, the US State Department renewed its allegation that he put people at risk.

"The documents they published gave identifying information of individuals who were in contact with the State Department," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters in Washington.

"That included opposition leaders, human rights activists around the world -- whose positions were put in some danger."

The US Justice Department has banned Assange from returning to the United States without permission.

E.Qaddoumi--SF-PST