_{The Mail on Sunday November 9, 2003}

Did a sinister cult of German Nazis drive

This brilliant British Student to his death?

From Sarah Oliver

In Wiesbaden, GermanY

German police are refusing to reopen their investigation into a bizarre ‘suicide’ of a Jewish man – despite strong evidence he was fleeing for his life when hit by a car

This was no place for a man to die: a grim junction on the Wiesbaden ring road, bathed in the neon blue of an all-night petrol station. Help lay just beyond at a cheap hotel while the lights of Germany's most exclusive spa town shone just two miles away. Yet it was here that British student Jeremiah Duggan, 22, ran into the road and was hit by a car last March. He suffered fatal head injuries in a 'clear case' of suicide, according to German authorities.

But last week that verdict was overruled by British coroner Dr William Dolman. He said: 'It was impossible and incorrect. I could not accept the bald conclusion that Jeremiah Duggan intended to take his own life. I felt it necessary to broaden the investigation and the evidence has led us to the murky and secretive structures of political organisations in Europe. I think we all have reason to be frightened.' His words must lead us now to ask: who or what made Jeremiah run? And why? But in a cruel reply, German authorities have declared themselves unwilling to reopen the case. The truth, according to Jeremiah's mother, Erica, lies behind the doors of the secretive Schiller Institute in Wiesbaden, to where Jeremiah travelled the weekend before his death. The brilliant student thought he was attending an anti-Gulf War rally - but the institute, named after Germany's equivalent of Shakespeare, is far from the civilised seat of learning its title suggests. It is the German front for the bizarre political cult run by American demagogue Lyndon LaRouche, whose worldwide organisation - which boasts its own intelligence and security unit - disguises its fascist ideology as maverick conservatism and which is accused of both anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism. Jeremiah Duggan cannot have known this, for he was Jewish, the grandson of refugees from Hitler's Holocaust. Distressed by the anti-Semitic rhetoric he encountered at | the institute that weekend, he stood I up and proclaimed his faith. Four ' days later he was dead.

Little is known of what happened during those days but, crucially, he made two phone calls to his mother in North London just 45 minutes before he died in the early hours of the morning. In the first he whispered: 'Mum, I'm in trouble, deep trouble. I want to be out of this, it's too much for me.' In the next, seconds later, he screamed: Tm frightened, I want to see you now.' Before she could reply, the line went dead. Then he fled from the centre of Wiesbaden, where he had been lodging at an apartment belonging to institute executive Rainer Apel, to the ring road, Berliner Strasse.

Helmut Klinger, of Wiesbaden police, said Jeremiah had been seen 'jumping with full force' into the side of the car which killed him. 'We are satisfied it was suicide and the case remains closed. If British police believe otherwise, then they must send a representative to put their case to the prosecutor's office.'

But at the Wiesbaden prosecutor's office, Dr Dieter Arlet said: 'Despite what the UK coroner said, it is clear to us it was a suicide. The driver who killed him was investigated fully, and he had nothing to do with the Schiller Institute. We believe this young man was psychiatrically disturbed. We are more than satisfied that all efforts were made to correctly determine how he died. The case is closed.'

Both the prosecutor and the police were keen to state that no one else was nearby when Jeremiah died. In short, he was not pushed. But that still leaves the key question: would a happy, stable, intelligent 22-year-old really kill himself without motive and in such a bizarre fashion?

Home Office pathologist Dr Ken Shorrock says he 'can neither recall ever having seen a case where some one has committed suicide by jumping into traffic, nor ever hearing of one'. His Berlin counterpart agree it was an 'uncommon, unreliable an ineffective method'. Which clashes with the reported claim by Germs police that 'hundreds' of people kill themselves in this way.

One witness to Jeremiah's deal was Ingrid Lemke, 38, who was travelling in her VW Golf. She said: definitely can't say it was suicide as happened so quickly. I remember seeing his body flying through the air. It was horrible. Maybe he was running from something, but I can’t say because it was dark and it was over in fractions of a second.'

But if it wasn't suicide, what d: happen and why was Jeremiah so afraid? He appeared happy, studying at the Sorbonne and the British Institute in Paris and enjoying life with girlfriend Maya, 23.

His mother, Erica, 57, describe her son as 'curious about everything and eternally enthusiastic about life.

It was this quest for knowledge, and his fears over the possibility of war in the Gulf, which drew Jeremiah to the shadowy world of the Schiller Institute.

Maya said: 'He started devouring newspapers. When he encountered workers from the LaRouche newspaper Nouvelle Solidarite, they became his role models. He said he wished all his friends were as intelligent and worried about the war as them.

'I don't believe he knew about the Schiller Institute because he decided to go spontaneously and had no time to research it. All he told me was that it was an anti-war gathering of the Left.'

But when he arrived, he discovered the 'rally' was a conference called How To Reconstruct A Bankrupt World and featured a series of lectures about the global economy. LaRouche himself spoke on Friday, March 21.

By the end of the conference on the Sunday, Jeremiah's behaviour began to change. He made a troubled phone call to Maya on the Wednesday.

She said: 'He said he was not coming home as planned and that he had learned terrible things, such as foreign governments were experimenting on humans and he feared there was an implant in his body. Then there was the phone call the morning he died, a feeble little voice, traumatised, fearing for his safety.

He told her: I’m under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more or what are lies.' This call was followed by the two to his mother.

Maya said: 'I told him to come home but he didn't, or couldn't. Jeremiah would not have killed himself. He was running for his life and we don't know what could have been said or done to make him feel that way. I am sure it is connected to the institute and the German police have been very slapdash in not pursuing that.'

John Berlet, of Political Research Associates, an American think tank monitoring the far Right, says: 'The LaRouche network has a long history of violence, intimidation, harassment, psychological manipulation and emotional blackmail - or brainwashing. Its anti-Semitism is hidden in convoluted conspiracy theories and obscure terminology, but its literature [talks of] a global and age-old conspiracy of "bad" Jews.

'It is likely that LaRouche Security went on alert as soon as Jeremiah Duggan announced he was Jewish and concerned about rhetoric he found anti-Semitic.

Their first reaction would probably be to pressure him into dropping his family, religious or ethnic allegiances and embrace the LaRouche view unquestioningly. Given the history of inappropriate over-reaction by those forces, it is quite possible Jeremiah Duggan was subjected to extreme emotional pressure or physical intimidation which could reasonably be investigated.'

It might be easy to dismiss this as paranoia, but in the mid-Eighties an investigation of LaRouche by the Washington Post quoted several dropouts whose damning testimonies spoke of '24-hour-a-day total immersion', 'sycophantic obedience' and 'pure psychological terror'. LaRouche is known for his outlandish theories, such as the British Royal Family being behind global drug trafficking.

But more seriously, he is also a Holocaust revisionist who described Judaism as 'only a half religion' and Jewish culture as 'merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Gentiles'.

Was it exposure to this which made Jeremiah run? The Schiller Institute, run by LaRouche's third wife, Helga, remains typically quiet. Days after his death, one executive, Ortrum Cramer, told Erica, 'We cannot take responsibility for the actions of individuals' and suggested Jeremiah had psychological problems.

Later, LaRouche would call the Duggan affair a 'hoax' constructed by supporters of Tony Blair and US Vice President Dick Cheney. It was 'such an obvious fabrication that no further comment is necessary', he said.

That might have satisfied the German authorities, but not the British. Following Dr Dolman's stand, it was revealed that Scotland Yard detective Jayne Cowell had expressed concerns about the 'sinister and dangerous connections' of the Schiller Institute. She wrote: 'The institute blames the Jewish people for the Iraq war and all the other problems of the world.

'Jeremiah's lecture notes show the anti-Semitic nature of the ideology... Has Jeremiah been subjected to some kind of mental manipulation by the LaRouche movement?'

The British coroner is now seeking to use European human rights legislation to force the German authorities to investigate again. As Erica said: 'We have a right to justice. It will haunt me always. My son asked me to rescue him and I could not.

'He was running to protect himself, running from danger, running because he wanted to live, not because he wanted to die.

'He was terrified and facing some threat physical, emotional, spiritual, we just don't know. But he was trapped in something he could not handle. I suppose in trying to find out what killed him I am still trying to save him.

'Given Germany's shameful history towards the Jews you would have expected a moral responsibility to establish the truth. Wouldn't you?'

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