TRYING to keep her emotions in check, Erica Duggan lays a bouquet of cream and pink roses and baby’s breath at the spot on the B455 dual carriageway in Wiesbaden, just outside Frankfurt, where her son Jeremiah’s body was found on March 27, 2003.
 

“This is my torment,” she says. “I don’t know what happened to him. There has never been a full investiga­tion in any country, except the ones I’ve carried out myself.”
 

The JC joined Mrs Duggan in Ger­many last week as the North Londoner made her latest attempt to discover why her son died, having spent close on £100,000 on her campaign to find the truth. She and her ex-husband Hugo have set up a memorial fund in Jeremi­ah’s name to finance investigations that no government or court will support.
 

Last Friday, on what would have been Jeremiah’s 26^th birthday, she launched proceedings in Germany’s highest court for an inquiry to be set up. The court , will rule within a month.
 

German police say that the student was hit by vehicles and that his death was suicide, which they are not legally required to investigate. A British inquest ruled that it was not suicide, describing Jeremiah as “in a state of terror” when he ran into the road. Forensic pho­tographer Paul Canning, who studied photographs of the scene, says Jeremiah

   by rachel fletcher, frankfurT
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may have been killed elsewhere and his body left on the road.
 

What is known is that the 22-year-old student had joined an organisa­tion called the Schiller Institute and believed it was holding an anti-war conference in Wiesbaden. He called his mother, sounding hushed and panicked, and told her he was "in deep trouble," adding: "I can't do this." The phone cut out as he was explaining his whereabouts. He was found dead 40 minutes later.
 

The Schiller Institute is part of a glo­bal organisation headed by the Ameri­can Lyndon LaRouche, a convicted fundraising fraudster and conspiracy theorist who has espoused antisemitic and anti-British conspiracy theories. At the conference, Jeremiah had disclosed that he was Jewish.
 

"Suicidal people talk in a 'farewell tone,'" Mrs Duggan says adamantly. "He was asking for rescue, to be helped to stay alive." Jeremiah had also called his French girlfriend Maya in a similar state of fear.
 

Among Mrs Duggan's supporters is Katrina, a German woman whose son has been involved in the LaRouche organisation for two-and-a-half years. "They indoctrinate young people, tell them they can save the world if they

work all day long at LaRouche, selling papers and publications and studying his essays and books." Her son, now 25, abandoned his coveted university place after a month, ended his relationship with his girlfriend and now contacts his family only once a month by email.
 

"I once told him the group is an-tisemitic and he was furious," Katrina confides. "But he says things like the factories on the American-Mexican border are worse than concentration camps. I asked him to come with me to Auschwitz to see, but he refused. Perhaps Jeremiah Duggan asked criti­cal questions. Maybe they thought he was a spy."
 

As well as legal proceedings, the Duggans want to hold a conference to promote dialogue between different groups to counteract organisations such as LaRouche's. Those involved in the dialogue initiative include Reverend Christian Weber, minister for youth affairs in the Church of Germany, who works with Yad Vashem.
 

"You can have dialogue with extrem­ists," he muses, "but you must never give them a platform."
 

Hugo Duggan maintains "an open mind about what happened. All I know is he put himself in mortal danger in the last couple of days by nature of the people he was with." Mrs Duggan main­tains that he was "unlawfully killed."