Com­ment: The fas­cist move­ment of Lyn­don LaRouche has made con­sid­er­able head­way in recent years in the so-called “pro­gres­sive” sec­tor. The fol­low­ing arti­cle reveals its true nature, as well as appar­ent col­lu­sion in a LaRouche killing by the Ger­man authorities.

“Mys­tery of the Dead Briton and the Right-Wing Cult” by Jerome Tay­lor; The Inde­pen­dent [UK]; 2/27/2010.

It was the kind of phone call every mother dreads. At 4.24am on 27 March 2003, Erica Dug­gan was woken by her son Jere­miah, a nor­mally ebul­lient 22-year-old. “Mum, I’m in trou­ble,” he said. In hushed tones, he told her he was in Ger­many and began spelling the let­ters of the place he was stay­ing, “W, i, e, s ...”. Then the line went dead.

The next call came from the police. Ger­man offi­cers had found Jerry’s body three hours later on the side of the B455, a busy dual car­riage­way run­ning south-east out of the city of Wies­baden towards the Rhine. Wit­nesses said a man had scram­bled into the cen­tre of the road and was hit by a brown Peu­geot 406, and then a blue Volk­swa­gen. By the time para­medics and police arrived, Jerry was dead of head injuries.

The sub­se­quent police inves­ti­ga­tion was per­func­tory, clas­si­fy­ing his death as a sui­cide. Wit­nesses were allowed to leave the scene, cars were moved before being pho­tographed and an exter­nal post-mortem was con­ducted at a nearby mor­tu­ary with­out any detailed foren­sic checks.

Few par­ents would find it easy to accept that their child has com­mit­ted sui­cide but for Mrs Dug­gan, a retired teacher from north Lon­don whose Jew­ish fam­ily fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, the idea that her son took his life did not make sense.

“He had so many plans for the future and never showed even the slight­est inkling of depres­sion,” she told The Inde­pen­dent, in her mother’s home in Gold­ers Green. “But it’s more than just that. The call I got from him just before he died, that was from some­one who des­per­ately wanted to live, who was try­ing to sur­vive. It wasn’t from some­one intent on killing himself.”

Mrs Dug­gan, in deep doubt of the Ger­man police belief that her son’s death was sui­cide, hired pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors and foren­sic experts to look at the evi­dence again, even­tu­ally sell­ing her house to pay the costs and mov­ing in with her age­ing mother. Their reports have cast seri­ous ques­tion marks over the offi­cial por­trayal of Jerry as sui­ci­dal, sug­gest­ing instead a man who was either des­per­ately try­ing to escape unknown assailants when he stum­bled out on the dual car­riage­way, or who had been attacked before he got there.

Yes­ter­day, armed with this new evi­dence, the Dug­gan family’s lawyers went to the High Court after the Attor­ney Gen­eral, Baroness Scot­land, took the highly unusual step of grant­ing them per­mis­sion to seek a sec­ond inquest into Jerry’s death.

The first inquest, in 2004, rejected the Ger­man police sui­cide sug­ges­tion, and returned an open ver­dict, find­ing instead that he had died in a “state of ter­ror”. But inves­ti­ga­tors failed to look wider. Sup­port­ers hope a fresh inquest will finally force Ger­man police to rein­ves­ti­gate why a British Jew died in mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances after spend­ing five days with a far-right polit­i­cal cult led by a con­victed fraud­ster who is known for his vir­u­lent anti-Semitic views.

Jerry had been a stu­dent at the British Insti­tute in Paris but he had trav­elled to Wies­baden to attend what he thought would be an anti-Iraq war con­fer­ence. “He was an ide­al­is­tic boy who wanted to change the world,” his mother said. “He was angry about the upcom­ing war and wanted to do some­thing about it. But he was also excited because he was begin­ning to learn about politics.”

The con­fer­ence was organ­ised by the Schiller Insti­tute, an extrem­ist polit­i­cal think-tank linked to a right-wing con­spir­acy the­o­rist, Lyn­don LaRouche. He is an 87-year-old con­victed fraud­ster who has made eight unsuc­cess­ful attempts to run as an inde­pen­dent can­di­date in the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. Some of LaRouche’s more unusual claims include that the British monar­chy and MI6 are behind the global drugs trade.

In the States, he is largely regarded as an amus­ing sideshow whose apoc­a­lyp­tic writ­ings attract vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple look­ing for answers. But under­ly­ing much of his work is a deep anti-Semitism that describes the world as being con­trolled by a mass Zion­ist con­spir­acy of bankers, lob­by­ists and politicians.

The Schiller Insti­tute, run by his German-born wife, spreads that mes­sage around Europe; on the night Jerry died, LaRouche addressed the con­fer­ence in Wies­baden. In Jerry’s notes on the five days he spent there, Mrs Dug­gan dis­cov­ered that her son had become aware of the anti-Semitic agenda of many LaRouche fol­low­ers and had spo­ken out against them. “There were a lot of com­ments blam­ing the Jews for Iraq and he got up to say that he was Jew­ish and he didn’t sup­port the war,” she said. “What­ever hap­pened it’s clear he fell out with these peo­ple very quickly.”

La Rouche blames the CIA, MI6 and the KGB for any polit­i­cal or media crit­i­cism aimed in his direc­tion. He described the Dug­gan case as a hoax con­trived by “admir­ers of [for­mer US Vice-President] Dick Cheney and Tony Blair”. Mrs Duggan’s efforts to inves­ti­gate her son’s death is, he says, a “smear”.

Paul Can­ning, a for­mer Scot­land Yard foren­sic offi­cer, has stud­ied the 79 pho­tographs taken by Ger­man inves­ti­ga­tors of the crash site and Jerry’s body. Ger­man police said he was hit by the Peu­geot, then run over by the Volk­swa­gen. But Mr Can­ning could not find evi­dence of tyre marks on the body. Nor was there any blood, flesh or hair on either car.

Mr Can­ning, who has inves­ti­gated hun­dreds of road fatal­i­ties, believes this is “incon­ceiv­able”, report­ing that he had never come across a high-speed col­li­sion of a car and pedes­trian where no traces of blood are found. “I do not believe the images depict how Jerry came to meet his pre­ma­ture death,” he added. “It is pos­si­ble that Jerry lost his life else­where, prior to being placed at the scene.”

Ter­ence Mer­ston, another for­mer Met Police inves­ti­ga­tor who has stud­ied the pho­tographs, backs Mr Can­ning. “Based on my years of expe­ri­ence in attend­ing thou­sands of crime scenes as a foren­sic scene exam­iner, it is my opin­ion that the evi­dence at the scene points towards Jeremiah’s death being extremely sus­pi­cious and not a road traf­fic acci­dent,” he said. “It is also my view that the dam­age to the Peu­geot car has been delib­er­ately caused.”

But how did Jerry sus­tain the head injuries that killed him? A post-mortem by a British pathol­o­gist, Dr David Shove, dis­cov­ered defence wounds on Jerry’s arms as well as blood in his lungs and stom­ach. At the speed that wit­nesses say he was struck, he would have been killed instantly, but the blood in his lungs and stom­ach (caused by breath­ing in and swal­low­ing after a major haem­or­rhage) sug­gest he was alive for some time, after intense trauma.

Mrs Dug­gan said: “What we really need is for Ger­many to look again at my son’s death.” But the Ger­man author­i­ties are reluc­tant to act. A bid by Ger­man lawyers claim­ing police breached human rights laws by fail­ing to inves­ti­gate prop­erly has floun­dered for four years in the country’s high­est court, the Fed­eral Con­sti­tu­tional Court. Police in Wies­baden have refused to rein­ves­ti­gate, or reopen their files.

Now, a British inquest is the best oppor­tu­nity the Dug­gan fam­ily has for find­ing out what really hap­pened to Jerry. “It’s been a long and dif­fi­cult jour­ney but I’m begin­ning to think we may be near­ing the end,” a vis­i­bly exhausted Mrs Dug­gan added. “From the moment I got that call it’s been a seven-year fight for jus­tice. I can’t stop now.”