Canberra (AFP) – A former US Marines pilot lost an appeal Thursday in an Australian court against his extradition to the United States, which has accused him of illegally training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers. Daniel Duggan, 57, has been held in prison since his arrest in a rural town in New South Wales state in 2022, shortly after he returned from living in China for close to a decade as an aviation consultant. Duggan has denied the US charges.
His arrest came days after Britain warned its former military pilots not to work for a South African flight training school that was training large numbers of Chinese pilots, where Duggan had worked a decade earlier. Outside the court on Thursday, his wife Saffrine said she was disappointed with the ruling and urged Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to stop the extradition, which has already been approved by the Attorney General. “Our prime minister can overrule this at any time,” she said. Duggan’s legal team said it had 28 days to consider whether to make another legal appeal.
Duggan is alleged by the US to have committed four offences between 2009 and 2012 in relation to training pilots in South Africa, including breaking a US arms embargo and money laundering. A 2017 indictment in the United States, unsealed after his arrest, showed Duggan was one of several former military pilots linked to the South African company and a Chinese recruiter who were alleged to have broken US law. Federal court judge James Stellios did not accept the argument made by Duggan’s legal team that the US offences were not illegal acts in Australia at the time.
Duggan’s lawyers had argued there was no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained had worked for the military. The Chinese state aviation giant they worked for, AVIC, has since been sanctioned by the US as a Chinese military-linked company. Duggan moved to China from Australia in 2013. His lawyers have previously said he was barred by China from leaving in 2014 and came to fear for his family’s safety.
Duggan came to the attention of US investigators through his emails to a Chinese national who was recruiting western ex-military pilots, Su Bin. Su Bin was convicted in the US in 2016 for hacking US defence contractors. Duggan is a naturalized Australian citizen and renounced his US citizenship at the Beijing embassy in 2016, seeking to backdate it to 2012, a Sydney court previously heard. Australia toughened its laws on former defence staff training foreign militaries seen as a security risk in 2023.
© 2024 AFP
