Death of Jeremiah Duggan - Misplaced Pages

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Jeremiah 'Jerry' Duggan, a British student at the Sorbonne in Paris, was 22 years old when he died on March 27, 2003 near Wiesbaden, Germany after running in front of cars on a busy road, apparently deliberately.

File:Jeremiah Duggan.jpg

Jeremiah Duggan

Jeremiah, who was Jewish, had been attending a conference organized by the Schiller Institute, part of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. This was his only contact with the LaRouche movement, having had no prior history of activism in the organization.

After leaving the LaRouche meeting in Bad Schwalbach, near Wiesbaden, Jeremiah telephoned his mother in England to tell her: "I am in terrible trouble, deep trouble." His mother says he sounded terrified. Then they were cut off. Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead.

Wiesbaden is believed to be the European center of the LaRouche network and the controversial LaRouche Youth Movement, which was formed in 1999. Many Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith say the entire LaRouche network is anti-Semitic. LaRouche, a former Trotskyist, 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). The Schiller Institute is run by his German-born wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of the German Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party (Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, or BüSo.) The conference that Duggan attended was held to organize opposition to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

The German authorities initially pronounced Jeremiah's death a suicide, but a subsequent British inquest held in Hornsey, north London, concluded there was nothing in the German report, and nothing in his background, that suggested suicide. Jeremiah had no history of mental illness, the court heard. The inquest also ruled that he was in a "state of terror" when he died.

The coroner, Dr. William Dolman, reached his conclusion after studying evidence presented by Jeremiah's mother, Erica Duggan, a retired school teacher living in Golders Green, London, who has conducted an investigation since July of 2003, several months after her son's death. Skeptics suggest that she had a change of heart and began to blame the Schiller Institute after the intervention of Baroness Elizabeth Symons, a prominent supporter of the Iraq war.

In court, Mrs. Duggan described the Schiller Institute as a "dangerous and political cult with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics." The court heard that the German police (BKA) investigation had relied on statements made to them by members of the Schiller Institute, many of which had turned out to be untrue.

Mrs. Duggan believes her son was a victim of mind-control techniques used by cults to snare people into joining them. She is being supported by the British Foreign Office in her quest for a new German investigation. Baroness Elizabeth Symons, head of Consular Services at the Foreign Office has helped Mrs. Duggan launch the Justice for Jeremiah campaign and website. Nikolas Becker, a Berlin-based lawyer who represented former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker, is representing the Duggan family in their efforts to have the German suicide verdict overturned.

Mr. 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."

The LaRouche organization is regarded by many as an extremist, anti-Semitic cult. Erica Duggan has told reporters that, when German police broke the news of her son's death, they said: "Go nowhere near these people. They are dangerous." (See political views of Lyndon LaRouche.) A Scotland Yard report describes the LaRouche organization as "a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections."

LaRouchies, as they are known to American journalists, believe that the British royal family is involved in the international drug trade; that M16 and Prince Philip were involved in the death of Princess Diana; and that rogue elements within the U.S. military were involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Jeremiah was in Paris when he decided to attend what he believed was an anti-war conference in Wiesbaden to protest the United States invasion of Iraq, which had just begun. He travelled to Germany on March 21, 2003 with Benoit Chalifoux, who edited Nouvelle Solidarité, the French-language newspaper of the LaRouche movement, and around eight other men in a convoy of cars. Jeremiah first contact with the Schiller Institute came about when he bought one of Chalifoux's newspapers in the street. Jeremiah had told his mother that the Institute was "very extreme," but he believed it had "solutions to problems he was worried about," she told the inquest.

During his stay in Wiesbaden, Jeremiah said in telephone calls to his parents and his French girlfriend that he found the conference stimulating. However, Mrs. Duggan told the Independent that after his death, she had a meeting with Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, scientific adviser to the Schiller Institute. According to Mrs. Duggan, Tennenbaum told her that Jeremiah had reacted strongly when he heard the Schiller Institute blame Jews for the Iraq war. Jeremiah allegedly stood up during a meeting and exclaimed: "But I'm a Jew!"

After six days at the conference, Jeremiah telephoned his mother just before 4:30 a.m. on March 27 and said: "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 ..." His mother said he was speaking quietly, as though afraid of being overheard. The line went dead. He called back seconds later and said, "I am frightened." Then he said, very loudly, "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.

Around the same time, he telephoned his girlfriend in France. She told reporters he sounded incoherent and faint. He told her: "I'm under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more, or what are lies." He told her his arms and legs hurt and that he had discovered some "very grave things." He told her he would be returning to Paris the next day.

Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah ran onto the Berliner Strasse, a busy road five kilometers from the apartment where he was staying, and was killed. The first car only grazed him, and he knocked off the wing mirror. He kept on running down the road for a kilometer for about ten minutes, according to witnesses. A second car knocked him down, then a third car ran over him. Drivers have told police he looked as though he was running for his life, not trying to end it.

Erica Duggan, whose father was a German Jew, told the Times: “It is ironic that my father fled the Holocaust and my son ended up dying on Berliner Strasse."

After her son had telephoned her, but before news of his death reached her, Erica Duggan managed to obtain a telephone number for the apartment Jeremiah was staying in. A woman she believes to be a manager at the Schiller Institute, Ortrun Cramer, came to the telephone. Duggan told the London Times she heard Cramer say: "It's the mother." Duggan and Cramer had a brief conversation during which Cramer said Nouvelle Solidarité was a news agency and did not "take responsibility for an individual’s actions."

A German police document shows that Ortrun Cramer was found to be in possession of Jeremiah's passport.

Ms. Cramer was among a group of international observers at the Michigan Democratic Caucuses on March 11, 2000, who came to observe whether votes for Lyndon LaRouche would be counted. She was admitted as an observer because she was an authorized representative of the Vienna-based International Progress Organization.

The LaRouche organization strongly denies any involvement in Jeremiah's death. In a June 2005, 2004 article in the organization's weekly magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, Larouche's Director of Counter-Intelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, writes that Jeremiah had told his room-mates at the conference that he had been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), an illness that Steinberg alleges can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia.

Steinberg writes that Jeremiah had begun to show 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. When a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer telephoned Jeremiah's girlfriend, Maya, in Paris to ask whether she had heard from him, she allegedly asked: "Is there a river nearby?", the implication being that Jeremiah was already known to have suicidal tendencies. But Maya has told reporters she asked this only because she trying to find Wiesbaden on a map.

Steinberg also claims that Erica Duggan has told reporters that she, Jeremiah and her divorced husband attended group counseling sessions at the Tavistock Clinic in London when Jeremiah was seven years old.

Erica Duggan does not deny this. One of the more bizarre claims of the Lyndon LaRouche organization is that the highly respected Tavistock Institute, which according to the LaRouche organization ran the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II, is itself involved in mind control activities on behalf of the British government and the CIA. Mrs. Duggan is worried that Jeremiah may have questioned the group's views on the Tavistock too.

Lyndon LaRouche has issued a statement saying the Duggan affair is a "hoax" constructed by supporters of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney. It is "such an obvious fabrication that no further comment is necessary," said LaRouche.

Since his release from jail, LaRouche has tried to cultivate ties with left-wing groups, and has forged an alliance with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, according to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a U.S. think tank that monitors extremist groups.

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