The family of Harry Dunn have suggested that US citizen Anne Sacoolas might have been distracted by her phone before she hit Dunn who was killed in the crash in August 2019, Fox News reported Monday.
Family lawyers have filed several complaints with the Eastern District Court of Virginia, alleging that Sacoolas avoided police questioning about her SIM card and phone data, suggesting that she might have done so to conceal that she was using it in time of the accident.
"The data on that phone likely would reveal whether she was using the phone just before or at the time of the collision, for example, speaking to someone on a call, reading a text, checking the weather, or otherwise engaged with her phone so as to be distracted from realising that she was driving on the wrong side of the road," Fox News quoted the court document as saying.
Sacoolas' lawyer, John McGavin, claimed that his client did not take any steps to remove data from her phone.
"When she returned to the United States she changed the SIM card because the SIM card in use on August 27, 2019, was for use in the United Kingdom," court documents read, according to Fox. "The defense claims that actions taken to transfer her number to a new phone "were not intended to remove any data from the phone that she was using on August 27, 2019."
An adviser for the family, Radd Seiger, asserted that the US government "will continue to do everything within their power" to "stop" the Dunns from seeking the truth about their son's death.
"The US government’s decision-making process has been impossible to understand from the moment they learned of Harry’s death," he said, cited by Fox News. "Instead of seeking to do the right thing for the family then, they foolishly decided to put their own interests first despite warnings from all of us that it would backfire in their faces."
Death of Harry Dunn
The 19-year-old UK man, Harry Dunn, was riding his motorbike when he was killed by a car driving on the wrong side of the road, in August 2019.
The incident took place in the United Kingdom near the village of Croughton in central England. Behind the wheel was Sacoolas, an alleged spy herself, and wife of CIA agent Jonathan Sacoolas, who at the time worked at RAF Croughton, a military base operated by the US Air Force.
After the fatal incident, Anne Sacoolas swiftly fled the UK without informing the country's police and later sought diplomatic immunity, which was thrown into question due to McGavin's statements that the couple left Britain due to "security issues". At the time, he also said that Sacoolas' job was “a significant factor” in her fleeing the country.
According to a 1995 agreement between the US and the UK, US intelligence officers at RAF Croughton are ineligible to claim diplomatic immunity, but the deal does not cover spouses and children.
The United States has refused to extradite Sacoolas, citing diplomatic immunity, with the Biden administration not reversing a decision made by the Cabinet of the former president, Donald Trump. Washington has also perpetuated a "protective order" seeking to conceal the details of the employment of Sacoolas and her husband.