London, March 03: The US Army has filed twenty-two new charges against a US Army private, suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive and classified documents to the WikiLeaks.
The most serious new charge filed against Private First Class E. Bradley Manning, alleges that he aided the enemy by making this information public.
Although aiding the enemy is a capital offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the prosecutors have said they do not plan to seek Manning’s death penalty if he is convicted and instead the 23-year-old soldier would possibly face life-time imprisonment, the army said in a statement.
The new charges accuse Manning of using unauthorized software on government computers to extract classified information, illegally download it and distribute it to more than 250,000 confidential State Department cables as well as a deluge of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. Thousands of the documents have been published on the WikiLeaks website.
“The new charges more accurately reflect the broad scope of the crimes Pfc. Manning is accused of committing,” said Captain John Haberland, Military District of Washington spokesman.
The Pentagon has yet to explicitly link him to the Wikileaks website, but the grave charge of “aiding the enemy” raised the possibility that Wikileaks itself could be defined as the enemy.
The US military had already announced 12 charges against Manning in July, accusing him of violating federal, criminal and military law.
Many US and Western officials have condemned Wikileaks for publishing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military documents and diplomatic cables over the past several months.
——–Agencies