Suspect in fatal crash agrees to face U.K. police in U.S.
LONDON — British police officers investigating a crash that killed a teenage motorcyclist in Britain in August will travel to the United States to interview the American suspect who claimed diplomatic immunity and fled the country shortly after the accident, the police said Tuesday.
The development is the latest in a weekslong episode that has engaged Britain and the United States in a diplomatic push-andpull as the teenager’s family traveled between the two countries in a search for answers and justice.
The suspect in the case, Anne Sacoolas, 42, is the wife of an American diplomat who worked at a Royal Air Force base that hosts a U.S. Air Force communication station.
As such, she was entitled to immunity under a 1995 treaty between Britain and the United States, Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told Parliament on Monday.
She is suspected of being the driver of a car that the police say was traveling on the wrong side of the road when it collided with a motorcycle ridden by Harry Dunn, 19, on Aug. 27 in Brackley, a town about 60 miles northwest of London.
Although Sacoolas cooperated with the local police immediately after the crash, the next day she informed them of her diplomatic immunity, Chief Constable Nick Adderley of Northamptonshire Police told reporters Tuesday.
This effectively halted their communication with Sacoolas.
Adderley said Tuesday that Sacoolas had agreed to be interviewed in the United States, and that the file of evidence the police submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service was incomplete without an account from her about the crash.
He said British officers would travel to the United States once their visas were approved.
British and American officials have said that Sacoolas’ claim of immunity is no longer relevant since she has returned home. A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service said in an email Tuesday that it would decide its course of action once all the evidence from the police investigation had been gathered.
A spokesman for Harry Dunn’s family, Radd Seiger, said Tuesday that the family had not been told of Sacoolas’ agreeing to a police interview in the case, which has led to diplomatic tangling on both sides of the Atlantic.
The teenager’s parents, Tim Dunn and Charlotte Charles, met with Raab two weeks ago, an exchange that Charles said had felt in part like “a publicity stunt.”
The couple were also disillusioned by a meeting they had last week with President Donald Trump in the White House, having traveled to the United States after making a public appeal to the American authorities.