Jeremiah Joseph Duggan (10 November 1980 – 27 March 2003) was a British student in Paris who died during a visit to Wiesbaden, Hesse, Germany, after being struck by several motorists on a dual carriageway. The circumstances of Duggan's death became a matter of dispute because, at the time he died, he was attending a youth "cadre" school organised by the LaRouche movement, an international network led by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche.
German police concluded that Duggan had committed suicide after running several kilometres from the apartment in which he had been staying, then jumping in front of early-morning traffic. A British coroner rejected a suicide verdict in 2003 after hearing the London Metropolitan Police describe the LaRouche movement as a political cult. Duggan telephoned his mother, Erica Duggan, fifty minutes before he died, apparently distressed about his involvement in it.Muir, Hugh. "Mystery death of anti-war student", The Guardian, 12 July 2003.Kirby, Terry. "Coroner denounces cult suicide claim", The Independent, 4 November 2003.Muir, Hugh. "British student did not commit suicide, says coroner", The Guardian, 5 November 2003.
Arguing that German police had not investigated the case thoroughly, Erica Duggan commissioned forensic reports which suggested the car crash might have been staged and that Duggan had died elsewhere. After protracted litigation in the UK and Germany, the High Court in London ordered a second inquest in 2010,"Fresh inquest into student death", BBC News, 20 May 2010. and in 2012 the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court ordered the Wiesbaden police to reopen their investigation. In 2015 the coroner upheld that Duggan had been killed in the accident, but rejected a suicide verdict, adding that unexplained injuries suggested an "altercation at some stage before his death."Taylor, Matthew. "Jeremiah Duggan's death not a suicide, British coroner rules", The Guardian, 21 May 2015.Barfield, Tom. "Family's ten-year quest for truth about dead son", The Local, 22 May 2015.
The LaRouche movement attributed criticism of its involvement in the case to LaRouche's political opponents, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US Vice President Dick Cheney, who they say sought to discredit LaRouche over his opposition to the 2003 Iraq War and his criticism of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming.Samuels, Tim. Newsnight, Newsnight, BBC News, 12 February 2004, 3/3, 00:05:19.
Background Duggan family Jeremiah Duggan was born in North London to Erica Duggan, a Jewish schoolteacher from South Africa; and her husband, Hugo Duggan, who was raised in Ireland.Erica Duggan's profile, blogger.com. Retrieved 6 January 2010."His life", justiceforjeremiah.com. Erica's father left Berlin in 1933; many family members were killed during the Holocaust. Nordhausen, Frank. "Jeremiahs letzte Worte", Berliner Zeitung, 11 May 2004. Erica, in turn, left South Africa due to apartheid. She, Hugo, Jeremiah and his two older sisters made their home in the London suburb of Golders Green. Zylbersztajn, Daniel. "Revision eines Todesfalls", Jüdische Allgemeine, 4 June 2015."Jeremiah Duggan's mother criticises new German death probe", BBC News, 28 May 2014. Duggan's parents divorced when he was aged 7.
Duggan attended Fitzjohn's Primary School in Hampstead, Quainton School for Boys, and won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital school in Sussex as a boarder. After his A-levels, he spent time in India then trained in Israel as a youth leader.Kirby, Terry. "The lost boy", The Independent, 28 August 2003. Duggan was interested in the arts, music and the theatre, and in 2001 moved to Paris to study French at the British Institute and English at the Sorbonne.BBC Newsnight, 12 February 2004, 1/3, 00:01:49; also 2/3, 3/3. Duggan's mother said he became interested in politics after 9/11; his strong opposition to the Iraq War led him to become involved with the LaRouche movement.Taylor, Jerome. "Mystery of dead Briton and the right-wing cult", The Independent, 27 February 2010.
LaRouche movement
Lyndon LaRouche and his German wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, ran a global political network of publications, committees and a youth cadre based in Leesburg, Virginia, United States, and in Wiesbaden, Hesse, Germany. The movement in Germany is represented by the Schiller Institute and the Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität party. LaRouche stood as a presidential candidate in the US eight times between 1976 and 2004.Tarr, Dave; Benenson, Bob. Elections A to Z, CQ Press, 2012, 303–304. He was jailed in 1989 for conspiracy to commit fraud, a prosecution he claimed was politically motivated."Debtor's Prison: Lyndon LaRouche", Time magazine, 6 February 1989."LaRouche Is Released And Plans Campaign", The New York Times, 27 January 1994.
From the 1970s the movement became associated with the promotion of conspiracy theories, and at times with the use of violence against opponents, the fraudulent use of donations, and antisemitism.Ciment, Jim. "Lyndon LaRouche," in Peter Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2003, 423–424.Minz, John. "Ideological Odyssey: From Old Left to Far Right", The Washington Post, 14 January 1985. There was criticism of its recruitment methods; according to The Sunday Times, recruits were isolated from their families, encouraged to give up their studies, and subjected to intense verbal pressure before being asked to accept the LaRouche worldview.Smith, David James. "Motorway madness", The Sunday Times, 18 July 2004. Archived at the (Internet Archive). Members said the allegations were misrepresentations, and LaRouche strongly denied the charge of antisemitism.LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. "On The Press Hoax Against the Pope: Britain's Bernard Lewis & His Crimes," LaRouche Political Action Committee, 17 September 2006. Archived at the Internet Archive.
LaRouche was particularly critical of Britain and of the Tavistock Institute in London, a psychotherapy and social sciences charity that the movement associated with British intelligence.Kirby, Terry. "The cult and the candidate", The Independent, 21 July 2004. In 1999 a LaRouche publication claimed Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was threatening to assassinate LaRouche, probably with backing from the British royal family.Burdman, Mark. "British Magazine Publishes Death Threat vs. LaRouche", Executive Intelligence Review, 13 August 1999. Duggan's family came to believe that this worldview affected the movement's perception of Duggan when the conference participants learned that he was a British Jew who, as a child, had attended the Tavistock Clinic for counselling when his parents divorced.
Duggan's involvement with the movement Nouvelle Solidarité
Duggan's first contact with the LaRouche movement was in Paris in January 2003, when he bought a copy of the LaRouche French-language newspaper, Nouvelle Solidarité, from a booth near the British Institute, outside the Invalides station on the Paris Métro. The man who sold him the paper was Benoit Chalifoux, a writer for the newspaper and one of the movement's "organizers", or recruiters.
Duggan was strongly opposed to the Iraq War, as were Chalifoux and his group of friends from the LaRouche movement.Louise Osmond, "Lost Abroad: The Parents' Story," Cutting Edge, Channel 4, 1 April 2010, 2/5, 00:01:28 (1/5, 3/5, 4/5, 5/5). Protests were taking place worldwide in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003. Duggan began seeing more of Chalifoux's group and was invited to attend a Schiller Institute conference near Wiesbaden, the LaRouche movement's European headquarters.Channel 4 Cutting Edge, 1 April 2010, 2/5, 00:05:40–00:07:10. Duggan and his parents assumed it was an anti-war conference. His mother searched for material about LaRouche on the web in vain; possibly she or her son misspelled the name as "Laroche."
Conference Duggan and Chalifoux travelled to Wiesbaden on 21 March with eight other men. Duggan stayed in a youth hostel at first, then with two other recruits in an apartment belonging to two Schiller Institute managers.
The conference, "How to Reconstruct a Bankrupt World," was held in Bad Schwalbach, near Wiesbaden, from 21 to 23 March. LaRouche was the keynote speaker, with a speech entitled "Physical Geometry as Strategy." According to April Witt in The Washington Post, he told the audience that US President George W. Bush was an unreformed drunk (he is a teetotaler), Woodrow Wilson had founded the Ku Klux Klan from the White House, John F. Kennedy was killed by a domestic American operation, and the US was using the war in Iraq to "ignite catastrophic global warfare." The plot to launch a world war was being influenced, he said, by people who "like Hitler, admire Nietzsche, but being Jewish ... couldn't qualify for Nazi Party leadership, even though their fascism was absolutely pure! As extreme as Hitler! They sent them to the United States." The people behind the plot were the "independent central-banking-system crowd, the slime-mold," he said, the same people who had brought Hitler to power in the 1930s.Witt, April. "No Joke," Washington Post Magazine, 24 October 2004, 12–17, 36–42. Archived at WebCite.
Youth cadre school After the conference, Duggan attended a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Wiesbaden with 60–70 others. Chalifoux, the recruiter who had accompanied him to Germany, returned to Paris. According to another potential recruit, there were hours of lectures, seminars and one-on-one meetings every day, as well as chanting and singing.Taylor, Matthew. "Student Jeremiah Duggan feared he was in trouble before 'suicide', says mother", The Guardian, 20 May 2015.
Duggan reportedly stood out because he was British and Jewish. A document from the Metropolitan Police, submitted to the first inquest, said the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement blamed the Jewish people for the Iraq war and other global issues, and that "Jeremiah's lecture notes and bulletins showed the anti-Semitic nature of [the] ideology."BBC Newsnight, 12 February 2004, 3/3, 00:02:23. According to Duggan's mother, the Schiller Institute's scientific adviser, Jonathan Tennenbaum, told her that when Duggan heard the Jews being blamed for the war during a seminar, he had stood up and said, "But I'm a Jew!" One participant said the others put him "through the wringer" because of it. Nordhausen, Frank. "Ermittlungen einer Mutter: Der mysteriöse Todesfall Jeremiah Duggon", Berliner Zeitung, 4 April 2007.
According to Witt, Duggan may have been placed under further pressure because he told the others he had attended the Tavistock Clinic as a child for counselling when his parents divorced. Duggan's conference notes showed that someone at the conference referred to the Tavistock as a "brainwashing" centre.
Incident Visit to Frankfurt
Duggan and his French girlfriend had planned to meet in Paris on Tuesday, 25 March. Instead he called her that day, two days before his death, to say he had no money for the fare home and was unable to get a ride until Sunday. He told her "very serious things" were happening and that he would explain when he returned.
On 26 March, Duggan accompanied LaRouche members to Frankfurt to hand out LaRouche literature in the streets, then to see the Rembrandt collection at the Städel museum. When one member asked what he thought of the artwork, he started crying. The woman invited him to step outside for some air. Duggan kept repeating that he did not trust LaRouche and said he wanted to go back to England. She told him he was free to leave and could phone her if he wanted to, which seemed to reassure him. She last saw him with one of his roommates sitting on the steps of the museum around 8:30 pm.Channel 4 Cutting Edge, 1 April 2010, 3/5, 00:06:25.
Duggan's telephone calls