Death of Jeremiah Duggan

Jeremiah Duggan was a British student at the Sorbonne who died on 27 March 2003 in Wiesbaden, Germany, while attending a youth cadre school organized by the LaRouche movement, an international network led by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche.

The German police said Duggan had committed suicide after witnesses said he ran onto a busy road and was struck by several cars. The circumstances of his death became a matter of public dispute when a British inquest rejected a suicide verdict, after hearing the view of the London Metropolitan Police that the LaRouche movement is a political cult. After Duggan's family commissioned private forensic reports suggesting he may not have been hit by the cars, and that his death may have occurred elsewhere, the High Court in London ordered a second inquest, which opened and adjourned in June 2010.

The German authorities have declined to reopen their investigation. The Wiesbaden prosecutor said in 2004 there was no doubt that as a consequence of his own behaviour and with no-one else involved, Duggan had thrown himself in front of several cars and died on the third attempt. In March 2009 a spokesman stressed again that there was no evidence linking the LaRouche movement to the death. In February 2010 the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany rejected the Duggan family's request for judicial review.

The LaRouche movement has said the controversy surrounding the death was stirred up by LaRouche's political opponents—including former British prime minister Tony Blair and former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney — because of LaRouche's criticism of the 2003 Iraq war and the man-made global warming hypothesis, and that the affair is being used by Neoconservatives to discredit the movement.