US Marine pilot arrested in Australia worked with Chinese hacker, says lawyer | India News

NEW DELHI: Daniel Duggan, a 55-year-old former US Marine pilot and naturalised Australian citizen, is currently fighting extradition from Australia to the United States on charges of training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers. According to his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, Duggan unknowingly worked with a Chinese hacker named Su Bin, who was convicted of stealing US military aircraft designs by hacking major US defence contractors.
Duggan denies the allegations that he violated US arms control laws and has been held in an Australian maximum security prison since his arrest in 2022, following his return from a six-year stint working in Beijing.
Collaery’s legal filing, seen by Reuters, reveals that US authorities discovered correspondence between Duggan and Su Bin on electronic devices seized from the latter. Duggan knew Su Bin as an employment broker for the Chinese state aviation company AVIC, which was blacklisted by the US last year due to its links to the Chinese military.
Messages retrieved from Su Bin’s devices show that he paid for Duggan’s travel from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, and Duggan had asked for Su Bin’s help in sourcing Chinese aircraft parts for his Top Gun tourist flight business in Australia.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Navy criminal investigators were aware of Duggan’s involvement in training pilots for AVIC and met with him in Tasmania in December 2012 and February 2013. According to Collaery, “An ASIO officer suggested that while carrying on his legitimate business operations in China, Mr Duggan may be able to gather sensitive information.”
Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was barred from leaving the country in 2014. He renounced his US citizenship in 2016 at the US embassy in Beijing, backdating it to 2012 on a certificate, after “overt intelligence contact by US authorities that may have compromised his family safety.”
Duggan’s lawyers are opposing extradition, arguing that there is no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained were military and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offences took place.
The United States government, however, maintains that Duggan did not lose his US citizenship until 2016. The case is set to be heard in a Sydney court this month, two years after Duggan’s arrest in rural Australia, which coincided with Britain’s warnings to its former military pilots against working for China.