Shining examples of personal responsibility around the globe: Update

Diplomatic immunity no longer applies to the American intelligence official’s wife involved in the road crash that killed 19-year-old Harry Dunn, the Foreign Office has said.

Anne Sacoolas, 42, left the UK shortly after the collision between Dunn’s motorbike and a car outside RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire on 27 August.

She is believed to have been driving the car but while she met with Northamptonshire police no investigation followed after the force was advised by the UK government that she had the protective status granted to foreign diplomats.

But after days of controversy surrounding the case, a letter from Dominic Raab to Dunn’s family seen by the BBC has suggested that her return to the US has rendered that status irrelevant.

“The US have now informed us that they too consider that immunity is no longer pertinent,” the foreign secretary’s letter says.

  Guardian

I can't understand why she left, given that she had diplomatic immunity.

(Minor point: This article says she was the wife of an intelligence officer; the earlier one said diplomat.)

Amid questions over the initial advice to Northamptonshire police, the home secretary played down the prospects of extradition but told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that the government was committed to ensuring “justice is done”.

“It very much seems that the lady in question wants to start cooperating with the discussions and the investigations and I think we should support that,” said Priti Patel.

[...]

The family’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said on Sky News on Sunday morning: “She wasn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity in the first place.”

Calling Sacoolas “a fugitive from British justice”, he suggested that the family could take legal action against her in a US court.

“Even if she were entitled to diplomatic immunity it only applies in the host country, so the UK. It does not apply in your home country …

“That means the Dunn family can sue her in the United States for the explanation that they need to psychologically get closure on the first part of their grieving process and move on with the grieving process.”

Sacoolas, whose husband worked at the US air force station, had only been in the country for three weeks at the time of the incident and she is said to have been “devastated” by it.

I'm sure she is. But she shouldn't have left the country.

[Her legal representative Amy Jeffress] said Sacoolas wanted to meet Dunn’s parents, Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn, to “express her deepest sympathies and apologies for this tragic incident”.

The couple are scheduled to fly to the US on Sunday ahead of visits to both New York and Washington DC.

Radd Seiger, who is representing the family, said their aim was to “put pressure on the US administration to do the right thing”.

He said he had spoken “very briefly” to Sacoolas’s legal team over the phone after arriving in the country on Saturday. “We have agreed to meet each other at the earliest possibility as soon as we can coordinate our diaries,” Seiger added.