Bradley Manning guilty of espionage in Wikileaks case

Bradley Manning, the US Army private who leaked thousands of classified documents, has been convicted of espionage but not of aiding the enemy.

Pte Manning, 25, has been found guilty of 20 charges in total, including theft and computer fraud.

He had acknowledged leaking the

documents to anti-secrecy organisation Wikileaks but said he did so to spark a debate on US foreign policy.

The leak is considered the largest ever of secret US government files.

He faces a maximum sentence up to 136 years. His sentencing hearing is set to begin on Wednesday.

In addition to multiple espionage counts, he was also found guilty of five theft charges, two computer fraud charges and multiple military infractions.

Pte Manning stood and faced Judge Colonel Denise Lind as she read the decision. She said she would release detailed written findings at a later date.

Being found guilty of aiding the enemy could have had serious implications for people leaking documents in the future, says the BBC's North America editor, Mark Mardell.

"The government's pursuit of the 'aiding the enemy' charge was a serious overreach of the law, not least because there was no credible evidence of Manning's intent to harm the USA by releasing classified information to WikiLeaks," Amnesty International said in a statement.

Among the items sent to Wikileaks by Pte Manning was graphic footage of an Apache helicopter attack in 2007 that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer.

The documents also included 470,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and 250,000 secure state department cables between Washington and embassies around the world.

Pte Manning, an intelligence analyst, was arrested in Iraq in May 2010. He spent weeks in a cell at Camp Arifjan, a US Army installation in Kuwait, before being transferred to the US.

During the court martial, prosecutors argued Pte Manning systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents in order to gain notoriety.

The defence characterised him as a naive and young soldier who had become disillusioned during his time in Iraq.

In a lengthy statement during a pre-trial hearing in February, Pte Manning said he had leaked the files in order to spark a public debate about US foreign policy and the military.