Foreign Office criticised over handling of Harry Dunn case
Review condemns “missed opportunities” and secrecy after teenage rider Harry Dunn was killed by a US diplomat’s wife in 2019.
The UK Foreign Office failed to recognise the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn as a crisis, and kept crucial information from his family, an independent review has concluded.
Dunn, 19, was riding his motorcycle near RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire in August 2019 when he was struck head-on by a car travelling on the wrong side of the road. The vehicle was driven by US State Department employee Anne Sacoolas, who claimed diplomatic immunity and later left the UK. At the time of the crash, Sacoolas was married to a CIA employee.
The report by Dame Anne Owers found that the Foreign Office, now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), missed “opportunities to influence” the US government before Sacoolas departed, and failed to communicate openly with Dunn’s family. Sacoolas left the country on 15 September 2019, but the family were not formally told her name, or that she had immunity, until 26 September.
Dame Anne said the secrecy fuelled “understandable distrust” and a belief that authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had conspired to “spirit her out”. Dunn’s father, Tim, already knew Sacoolas’s children had left the UK because he worked at their school, and the report said that withholding information only made the situation worse.
A police investigation later confirmed that Sacoolas was not arrested at the scene because she was in shock. Though she was employed by the US State Department, she held immunity only because she was married to a US intelligence officer. She eventually pleaded guilty in 2022 to causing death by careless driving and received an eight-month suspended sentence.
Dame Anne recommended that the government allocate emergency resources to similar cases, escalate them earlier, and properly involve families, rather than keeping them at arm’s length. She also praised the Dunn family and their Justice4Harry campaign for driving change, including the closure of the diplomatic loophole, which Sacoolas used to flee the UK, in 2020.
Harry’s mother, Charlotte Charles, said the report confirmed that the family “were not treated with the honesty or urgency that any grieving parent deserves”. At the same time, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper accepted the recommendations in full, saying no family “should have to fight for the support they rightly deserve.”
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
