By Kirsty Needham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Former U.S. Marine pilot Daniel Duggan will be extradited from Australia to face U.S. fees of coaching Chinese language army pilots to land on plane carriers, a Sydney Justice of the Peace dominated on Friday.
Duggan, 55, a naturalised Australian citizen, is going through U.S. fees together with cash laundering and breaking arms management legislation by coaching Chinese language army pilots to land on plane carriers. He denies the allegations.
He has 15 days to hunt a evaluation of the Justice of the Peace’s ruling. The choice to extradite will in the end be made by Australia’s Lawyer Common.
Exterior court docket his spouse Saffrine mentioned the household would attraction to Lawyer Common Mark Dreyfus to refuse the extradition.
One among seven co-conspirators in a U.S. indictment is convicted Chinese language hacker Su Bin, though Duggan’s attorneys argue the hacking case is unrelated.
Duggan was arrested by Australian federal police in a rural city in New South Wales state in October 2022, shortly after coming back from China, the place he had lived since 2014.
In the identical week, Britain issued a warning to its former defence employees to not practice Chinese language Folks’s Liberation Military pilots at a South African flying academy the place Duggan had additionally labored.
Duggan, whose spouse and 6 youngsters are additionally Australian, has been held in a most safety jail since his arrest. Saffrine positioned her hand towards the glass window to the dock the place Duggan sat in court docket on Friday.
Justice of the Peace Daniel Reiss mentioned the standards for extradition had been met. “Mr Duggan is eligible for surrender,” he mentioned.
Duggan’s attorneys had beforehand argued there isn’t a proof the Chinese language pilots he educated had been army, and that he turned an Australian citizen in January 2012, earlier than the alleged offences.
America authorities has argued Duggan didn’t lose his U.S. citizenship till 2016, when he signed a doc renouncing it within the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
Duggan was barred from leaving China in 2014, his lawyer wrote in a submitting to the legal professional normal, and knew Su Bin as an employment dealer for Chinese language aviation firm AVIC.
Su Bin pleaded responsible in 2016 to theft of U.S. army plane designs by hacking main U.S. defence contractors.
