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Death of Jeremiah Duggan

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Jeremiah Duggan

Jeremiah 'Jerry' Duggan (November 10, 1980 – March 27, 2003), a British student at the Sorbonne in Paris, was killed after running down the middle of a busy road near Wiesbaden, Germany. The circumstances of his death are controversial because he died while attending a youth "cadre school" organized by the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Youth Movement, which are part of the international political movement led by 82-year-old former American presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

The German police initially ruled that Duggan's death was a suicide. A British inquest rejected a suicide verdict after hearing the Schiller Institute described by Scotland Yard as a "political cult with sinister and dangerous connections." Duggan's mother believes he was left in a disturbed mental state after the LaRouche movement tried to recruit him. With the support of the British government, she is pressing the German government to investigate. Baroness Ludford MEP has said she may request the formal intervention of the European Parliament.

Lyndon LaRouche has called the allegations a "hoax" and an "obvious fabrication" constructed by supporters of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the U.S. vice-president, Dick Cheney as part of a campaign to discredit LaRouche over his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Background

Duggan was born in London, the son of Hugo, who is Irish, and Erica, who is Jewish. He attended Christ's Hospital School in Horsham, Sussex. After leaving school, he spent some time in Israel, then in 2001 he moved to Paris to study French at the British Institute, part of the University of London, and subsequently began a degree in English literature at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).

Duggan's first contact with the LaRouche movement was when he bought a newspaper in the street in Paris in early 2003 from Benoit Chalifoux, the editor of Nouvelle Solidarité, the movement's French-language newspaper. Chalifoux befriended Duggan and started teaching him about international politics, according to Duggan's telephone calls to his parents. Chalifoux invited Duggan to attend a Schiller Institute political conference in Wiesbaden. Wiesbaden is the European center of the LaRouche network. Duggan and Chalifoux travelled there together on March 21 with eight other LaRouche members in a convoy of cars. In Wiesbaden, Duggan was given a place to sleep in an apartment belonging to Schiller Institute managers Rainer and Ursula Apel.

It has been admitted by Duggans ex girlfriend and mother that Duggan was on medication that is proven to cause youth to commit suicide and has more recently become illegal to give to anyone under 18 in many European countries.

Duggan's death

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Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche himself was one of the speakers at the conference. Duggan said in telephone calls to his parents and his French girlfriend that he found the Institute "extreme," but the conference was stimulating. After Duggan's death, Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, a senior member of the Schiller Institute, told his parents that Duggan had reacted strongly when he heard Schiller Institute members blame Jews for the invasion of Iraq, which had just begun, and had stood up during one meeting and exclaimed: "But I'm a Jew!"

After the conference, Duggan decided to attend a "cadre school" held by the LaRouche Youth Movement in a nearby youth hostel, attended by about 50 members.

At around 4:15 a.m. on Thursday, March 27, Duggan telephoned his girlfriend. In a statement to Scotland Yard, she said he sounded incoherent and faint. He said: "I'm under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more, or what are lies." He said his arms and legs hurt and he had discovered some "very grave things" but could not tell her about them on the telephone. He said he would return to Paris the next day and would tell her then.

Duggan next telephoned his mother in London just before 4:30 a.m. He said in a quiet voice: "Mum, I'm in terrible trouble, deep trouble. I want to be out of this. It's too much for me. I can't do this. I want out . . ."

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Ortrun Cramer of the Schiller Institute

The line went dead. He called back seconds later and said, "I am frightened." She told him she loved him. At this, he shouted, "I want to see you now," and began to spell out the name of the town he was in. At that point, the line went dead again.

Forty-five minutes later, Duggan ran out on to the Berliner Straße, a busy road five kilometers from the apartment where he'd been staying. He was hit by one car, but according to eyewitnesses, he continued running along the road for another kilometer. A second car knocked him down, then a third car ran over him. He sustained fatal head injuries. The second driver who hit him said Duggan ran toward the car with his arms outstretched and his mouth open.

After Duggan's death, German police found that a senior Schiller Institute manager, Ortrun Cramer, was in possession of Duggan's passport. One of the issues the family wants to resolve is whether Cramer took possession of Duggan's passport before his death.

The inquest

The German police initially pronounced Duggan's death a suicide, but a British inquest held in London in November 2003 concluded there was nothing in the police report or in Duggan's background that suggested suicide, including no history of mental illness. The court heard that a Scotland Yard (London Metropolitan Police) report described the LaRouche movement as "a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections." The British psychiatrist who studied Duggan's medical history for the court also submitted a paper describing a severe stress reaction that can be caused by a rapid change in a person's belief system. Summing up, Coroner Dr. William Dolman said:

File:Weisbaden-Duggan.gif
A map showing the route down the BerlinerStrasse that Duggan is alleged to have run.

What was it, we ask ourselves, that turned a stable and apparently happy young man with a stable relationship, what was it that turned that young man into a terrified young man? We know that the weekend before he'd had friendly conversations with his girlfriend on the phone, that was five days before his death. What was it that impelled him to make a phone call in the early hours at 4.20 a.m in the morning on the day of his death? Then phone his mother an hour later. There is no doubt that there had been a huge change. What was he frightened of? What was he scared of, indeed terrified of? Was he scared of what might happen to him? Sadly we might never know what it was, but something had happened that made him run away from the house into the road.

Dr. Dolman then said he would deliver a narrative verdict. This is unusual in British courts, where coroners' verdicts are normally terse and formal:

Jeremiah Joseph Duggan received fatal head injuries when he ran into the road in Weisbaden and was hit by two private motor cars. What other fact do we know that I must add? I really must add that he had earlier been in a state of terror. It is a word not commonly used in a coroner's court but no other word would reflect his state of mind at the time.

The LaRouche movement

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Helga Zepp LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute

Lyndon LaRouche and his German-born wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche run a worldwide political movement from their bases in Leesburg, Virginia, and Wiesbaden, Germany (see LaRouche movement). The movement consists of an interlocking network of think tanks, magazines and newspapers, national and international political organizations, a political action committee, and a youth cadre. The group is widely seen as a fringe political cult. The movement teaches that Lyndon LaRouche is a central figure of international political and cultural importance, and that political activism on his behalf might save the world from an imminent global crisis. The movement has been associated in the mainstream media in the U.S., Germany, and the UK with violence against its political opponents, anti-Semitism, fraudulent use of political donations, aggressive recruiting techniques, and the dissemination of political conspiracy theories. Its members insist these allegations are misrepresentations, and that LaRouche is a brilliant and widely misunderstood leader.

LaRouche was released from jail in 1994 after serving five years of a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations (see United States v. LaRouche). He is a perennial candidate for President of the United States, and has set a record for most consecutive attempts by running eight times. (See Lyndon LaRouche U.S. Presidential campaigns.) His wife, who founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, is regarded as a controversial, far-right figure in Germany, where she has stood for office several times with no success, and was accused in the 1980s of orchestrating threatening telephone calls to, and death threats against, one of her political opponents, Petra Kelly of the German Green Party.

The LaRouche movement's beliefs often revolve around international conspiracies, frequently involving reference to the British Empire and high-placed cabals. Many critics and two court judges have ruled that it is fair to call some of these conspiracy theories antisemitic. LaRouche denies this. LaRouche publications have alleged that the British royal household is involved in the international drug trade; that rogue elements within the U.S. military were instrumental in causing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; that The Beatles were controlled by British intelligence; and that in 1999, MI6 and the British royal household left a coded message in a British women's magazine indicating they were planning to assassinate LaRouche.

A spokesman for the LaRouche movement has strongly denied the Schiller Institute was involved in Duggan's death, and has suggested that he was suffering from a mental illness. In a June 2004 article in the organization's weekly news magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, Larouche's director of counter-intelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, wrote that Duggan had told his conference room-mates he had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an illness that Steinberg alleged can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia.

Steinberg wrote that Duggan had shown signs of emotional stress the day before his suicide, and had fled from the apartment where he was staying at 3:30 in the morning. On the Sunday prior to his death, according to Steinberg, Duggan had tried to find a pharmacy where he could obtain prescription drugs. After he went missing on the morning of his death, a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer telephoned Duggan's girlfriend in Paris to ask whether she had heard from him. She is alleged to have asked, in what Steinberg called a cynical tone, "Is there a river nearby?", implying that Duggan was already known to have suicidal tendencies. However, the girlfriend has told reporters she asked this because she was trying to find Wiesbaden on a map.

Steinberg also wrote that Duggan attended group counseling sessions with his parents at the Tavistock Clinic when Duggan was seven years old and his parents were divorcing. One of the claims of the LaRouche movement is that the Tavistock, a well-known psychotherapy center in London, is involved in researching and practising mind control. Mrs. Duggan is worried that her son may have been singled out because he questioned the group's views on the Tavistock.

Steinberg said that, after Duggan's death, Mrs. Duggan met with representatives of the Schiller Institute in what Steinberg described as a "sympathetic" meeting. He wrote that Mrs. Duggan's attitude changed only after British minister Elizabeth Symons intervened in the affair on behalf of the British Foreign Office. According to Steinberg, Symons is a member of what the LaRouche movement calls the "trans-Atlantic network" that seeks to damage LaRouche because of his opposition to what it calls the Blair-Cheney war in Iraq.

Recruitment allegation

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Duggan's mother believes Duggan was the victim of a recruiting technique known as "ego stripping," in which the recruit is made to doubt all their basic beliefs, and which psychiatrists believe can lead to a mental breakdown. Nikolas Becker, the Berlin lawyer who represented former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker during the Berlin Wall shootings trial, is representing the Duggan family in their efforts to have the Germans investigate the Schiller Institute. Becker told a British newspaper:

There is enough evidence was probably in a hopeless psychotic situation and there is no evidence that there was any mental illness in his family. It is known these kind of organizations produce this kind of psychotic breakdown.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote during the 1970s about how psychoanalytic techniques might be used to address what he called "neurotic blocks to creativity." Under the pen name Lyn Marcus, he wrote in 1973 that:

he short-term focal objective of the Labor Committees' work in applied psychology is the willful development of powers of creative mentation in . . . the organization's cadres . . . The direct conscious perception of the fundamental emotion (love = creative mentation) . . . has been classically identified by the subject as an overwhelming (“oceanic”) and absolutely terrifying “non-erotic” feeling of “love-death” . . . Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion . . . Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse."

References

Further reading

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