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Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers of modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of Barack Obama in his final days as president.

Manning, a transgender woman, will walk from a male military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on 17 May, almost seven years to the day since she was arrested at a base outside Baghdad for offences relating to the leaking of a vast treasure trove of US state secrets to the website WikiLeak.

Manning, 29, is a former intelligence analyst in Iraq who was sentenced in 2013 after a military court convicted her of passing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks. It was the biggest breach of classified material in US history.

In 2010, WikiLeaks worked with media organisations including The Guardian to publish the Manning material that offered unprecedented insight into the workings of US diplomacy. Among the files Manning leaked was a gunsight video of a US Apache helicopter firing on suspected Iraqi insurgents in 2007, killing a dozen people including two Reuters journalists and on US military operations elsewhere.

Courtesy The Guardia