Report Blasts Foreign Office for ‘Distrust-Creating’ Failures in Harry Dunn Tragedy

An independent review has concluded that the Foreign Office failed to appropriately manage the case of Harry Dunn, withholding crucial information from his family and fostering profound distrust following his tragic death outside a US military base in 2019. The report highlights significant missed opportunities and a lack of crisis recognition by the department.

Harry Dunn, 19, died in August 2019 after being struck by a car driven on the wrong side of the road by Anne Sacoolas near RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire. Sacoolas, an employee of the US State Department, claimed diplomatic immunity and subsequently departed the United Kingdom on September 15, 2019. Millenium TV has learned that Mr. Dunn’s family was not officially informed of Sacoolas’s departure, her identity, or her immunity status until September 26, creating what the review described as a deep sense of betrayal.

Dame Anne Owers, who chaired the independent review, noted that Mr. Dunn’s father was already aware Sacoolas’s children had left the country due to his role as head of maintenance at their school. This disparity in information, Dame Anne explained, “understandably created distrust both of the message and the messengers,” leading to “the belief that there had been a conspiracy between the UK and US authorities to secretly ‘spirit her out’, with information deliberately withheld from the family.”

The review examined the department’s actions between the teenager’s death on August 27 and the end of December 2019. It revealed that the Foreign Office, now known as the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), asked Northamptonshire Police for a delay in informing the family about Sacoolas’s departure and later requested the police not to mention this delay when meeting with the family.

Dame Anne Owers stated that the issue “was not recognised as a crisis and escalated to a sufficiently high level at an early stage, losing opportunities to influence, rather than respond to, events.” She added that “Direct communication with the family was late, sporadic and often overtaken by events, and the FCDO was slow to recognise that the family were allies in achieving justice and securing other necessary changes.” Sacoolas later pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving in 2022, receiving an eight-month suspended jail term.

The report made several recommendations for the FCDO, including an “immediate surge of resources” with “early ministerial involvement” for exceptional circumstances, a clear strategy for family communication, and the deployment of consular staff skills in sensitive cases. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has committed to implementing these recommendations in full.

Harry Dunn’s mother, Charlotte Charles, expressed that the review had been “a hugely emotional experience” and “triggered a lot of anger.” She told reporters, “Having turned to the authorities for help, we got nothing from them. The report confirms what we have lived with every day for more than six years, that mistakes were made, that opportunities were missed, and that our family was not treated with the honesty or urgency that any grieving parent deserves.” She concluded, “Nothing will bring our beautiful Harry back, but today we feel seen, heard and believed.”

His father, Tim Dunn, echoed her sentiments, saying, “The hardest part is knowing that more could and should have been done for our boy in those early days. The lack of escalation, the confusion, the silence; it all made our loss so much harder to carry. What matters now is that lessons are learned. We expect every recommendation to be implemented so that no other family has to fight like we did.” The diplomatic immunity loophole, which allowed Sacoolas to leave the UK, was subsequently closed in 2020.