A former US military pilot arrested in Australia and facing likely extradition to the US on undisclosed charges listed the same Beijing address as a Chinese businessman jailed in the US for conspiring to hack US defense contractors’ computers, documents show.
The Beijing address is listed in Australian company filings for the pilot and in a US blacklisting for the Chinese businessman. It was unclear whether they used the Beijing address at the same time.
Australian Federal Police arrested Daniel Edmund Duggan, 54, a former US citizen, in the rural town of Orange in New South Wales state last month, acting on a US request for his arrest.
Photo: Reuters
Details of the US arrest warrant and the charges he faces are sealed, his lawyer said. Consequently, the specifics of Duggan’s case are not clear.
“He denies having breached any US law, any Australian law, any international law,” Duggan’s lawyer Dennis Miralis of Nyman, Gibson and Miralis said outside a Sydney court on Friday.
Miralis said Duggan was being moved to a maximum security prison in the regional town of Goulburn, and that he did not seek bail at a hearing in a Sydney local court. The matter was adjourned until Nov. 28.
A former military pilot said that Duggan, who became an aviation consultant after his military service ended, moved from Australia to Beijing in 2013 or 2014 to work with a Chinese businessman named Stephen, whom he identified as Stephen Su when shown a photograph by a Reuters reporter.
Su is known in China as Su Bin, a Chinese businessman convicted on hacking charges in the US.
Another aviation source also said Duggan went to Beijing to work with Su.
Su was arrested in Canada in July 2014 and jailed in the US two years later, in a high-profile hacking case involving the theft of US military aircraft designs by the Chinese military in which he pleaded guilty, court records show.
Company filings for Duggan’s former business, Top Gun Tasmania, showed Duggan had certified documents that notified of his change of address and his sale of the company in January and April 2014, stating his residential address from December 2013 was an apartment in Beijing’s Chaoyang District.
The same address appeared on the US Entity List in August 2014 as belonging to Su and his aviation company, Nuodian Technology, also known as Lode Tech in English-language marketing material.
The US Entity List is a trade blacklist of people and companies deemed to pose a risk to US national security.
The address remains on the US blacklist for involvement in the unauthorized exploitation of US Department of Defense contractor computer systems to illicitly obtain controlled technology related to military projects.
Su, 51, was sentenced to a 46-month prison term in 2016 by a Los Angeles court after being charged with taking part in a years-long scheme by Chinese military officers to obtain sensitive military information.
He pleaded guilty to conspiring with two Chinese air force officers who hacked into the computer systems of Boeing and other companies to obtain data about military projects, contravening the arms export control act.
Duggan arrived in Australia from China weeks before his arrest and had interacted with Australian intelligence agencies, his lawyer said.
Miralis said the US should not make an extradition request until this complaint was resolved.
“It’s important to understand the legal system in Australia has not yet seized jurisdiction of the matter,” Miralis said. “This has nothing to do with law, this has everything to do with international politics and international relations.”
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