By Kirsty Needham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – A former U.S. Navy pilot who was fighting extradition from Australia for training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers unknowingly worked with a Chinese hacker, his lawyer said. lawyer.
Daniel Duggan, 55, a naturalized Australian citizen, feared requests for sensitive information from Western intelligence agencies would put his family at risk, the lawyer said in a legal filing seen by Reuters.
The attorney’s filing supports Reuters reporting linking Duggan to convicted Chinese hacker Su Bin.
Duggan denies allegations that he violated US arms control laws. He has been held in a maximum security Australian prison since his arrest in 2022, after returning from six years working in Beijing.
US authorities found correspondence with Duggan on electronic devices seized from Su Bin, Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collaery said in the March submission to Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who will decide whether to hand Duggan over to the United States. United after a magistrate hears Duggan’s extradition case.
The case will be heard this month in a Sydney court, two years after his arrest in rural Australia, at a time when Britain was warning its former military pilots not to work for China.
Su Bin, arrested in Canada in 2014, pleaded guilty in 2016 to stealing models of US military aircraft by hacking major US defense contractors. He is listed as one of Duggan’s seven co-conspirators in the extradition request.
Duggan knew Su Bin as an employment agent for Chinese state airline AVIC, lawyer Collaery wrote, and the hacking case was “totally unrelated to our client.”
Although Su Bin “may have had inappropriate connections with (Chinese) agents, our client did not know this,” Duggan’s lawyer wrote.
“OPEN INTELLIGENCE CONTACT”
AVIC was blacklisted by the United States last year as a company linked to the Chinese military.
Messages recovered from Su Bin’s electronic devices show he paid for Duggan’s trip from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, according to extradition documents filed by the United States with the Australian court.
Duggan asked Su Bin to help him source Chinese aircraft parts for his Top Gun sightseeing flight business in Australia, Collaery wrote.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) and US Navy criminal investigators knew Duggan trained pilots for AVIC and met with him in the Australian state of Tasmania in December 2012 and February 2013, his lawyer wrote.
ASIO and the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on the meetings. ASIO previously said it would not comment as the matter was before the court.
“An ASIO official suggested that while carrying out his legitimate business activities in China, Mr Duggan might be able to collect sensitive information,” his lawyer wrote.
Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was barred from leaving the country in 2014, his lawyer said. Duggan’s LinkedIn profile and aviation industry sources who knew him said he worked in China as an aviation consultant in 2013 and 2014.
He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, backdated to 2012 on a certificate, after “clear contact with U.S. authorities that could have compromised the security of his family,” his lawyer wrote .
His lawyers are opposing extradition, arguing there is no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained were military personnel and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offenses.
The U.S. government claimed that Duggan only lost his U.S. citizenship in 2016.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; editing by William Mallard)
yahoo
