MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

WikiLeaks Assange free on bail and tagged moves to ten bedroom mansion

Ellingham Hall belongs to Vaughan Smith, London's Frontline journalists' club

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted bail Thursday by the High Court in London and will move from a prison cell in Wandsworth to a country retreat in Norfolk when he is released from custody.

Ellingham Hall is a 10-bedroomed property set on 600 acres of land near Bungay on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. The estate is owned by Vaughan Smith, a Wikileaks supporter who served in the British Army before founding London's Frontline journalists' club.

Mr Assange must stay there as part of his bail conditions, granted on Thursday by Mr Justice Ouseley at the Royal Courts of Justice. He must also wear an electronic tag, report to police every day and observe a curfew.

Mr Assange, who is fighting extradition to Sweden over sex charges involving two women, was granted bail in London earlier this week but remained in jail after prosecutors objected.

According to the bail conditions Mr. Assange must spend every night at Ellingham Hall, daily visits to the police and electronic tagging to enable the police to track his movements.

The judge also sought additional financial guarantees from at least two of Mr. Assange’s closest associates, Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell. The newest demands for bail and sureties brought the total to 370,000 US dollars.

Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s most prominent lawyers, who is assisting Mr. Assange’s defence team, joked on Thursday that during his stay at Ellingham Hall, Mr. Assange would also be under the scrutiny of the estate’s gamekeepers.

The hearing on Thursday was formally separate from Mr. Assange’s role in the publication of some 250,000 US diplomatic documents and came as federal prosecutors in Washington looked for evidence that would enable them to charge him with helping an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

US prosecutors believe that if he did so, they could charge him as a conspirator rather than a passive recipient of the documents.

WikiLeaks said on its Web site on Thursday that it had so far released 1,606 of the 251,287 diplomatic cables.

His incarceration has not ended the flow of classified US cables, mostly between US diplomats abroad and the State Department in Washington. Earlier, WikiLeaks published confidential US material relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.