The US soldier suspected of passing a trove of confidential government documents to the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website on Thursday faced a raft of new charges including "aiding the enemy." U0S military authorities unveiled 22 additional charges against Private Bradley Manning on Wednesday, including the serious accusation of "aiding the enemy," which carries a potential death sentence.
But military prosecutors do not plan to seek the death penalty if Manning is convicted and will instead opt for life in prison for the 23-year-old soldier, the army said in a statement. "The new charges more accurately reflect the broad scope of the crimes" that Manning is accused of committing, said Captain John Haberland, spokesman for the military district of Washington.
Manning, a former low-ranking intelligence analyst in Iraq, is accused of knowingly giving "intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means," according to the charge sheets. The US military had already announced 12 charges against Manning in July, accusing him of violating federal criminal and military law.
The Pentagon has yet to explicitly link Manning to WikiLeaks, but the charge sheets accuse him of illegally downloading hundreds of thousands of government documents and causing them to be "wantonly" published on the Internet. Manning knew that "intelligence published on the Internet is accessible to the enemy," according to the court documents.
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