Ben Roberts-Smith arrested: former Australian soldier to be charged with five war crime murders in Afghanistan | Ben Roberts-Smith
Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been arrested at Sydney airport for alleged war crimes.
Australian federal police and the Office of Special Investigations released details of the investigation in Sydney on Tuesday.
They said Roberts-Smith was expected to be charged with “five war crimes – murder”. The maximum penalty for the crime is life imprisonment.
Roberts-Smith was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday afternoon. The Victoria Cross recipient was previously accused of killing unarmed civilians while serving with the Australian SAS in Afghanistan.
Roberts-Smith, once the country’s most decorated Afghanistan veteran, sued three newspapers, alleging he committed war crimes, killed unarmed civilians and bullied his comrades.
He lost the long-running and expensive libel case after the judge found that on the “balance of probabilities” by civilian standards he had committed four murders while serving in the Australian army.
Roberts-Smith appealed to the full federal court bench but lost, and the high court declined to hear a new appeal. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Anthony Albanese declined to comment on Tuesday.
“It is not my intention to prejudge what is clearly a legal matter and is before these courts, and any comment would do that,” the Prime Minister told reporters in Canberra.
Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, was awarded the Victoria Cross for “most conspicuous bravery” during the battle of Tizak in 2010.
He was named father of the year and served as chairman of the government’s Australia Day council.
But in 2018 the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times published a series of articles alleging he was involved in war crimes, including killing civilians and ordering subordinate soldiers under his command to execute civilians in so-called “bloody” incidents.
Roberts-Smith sued the newspapers, saying the stories in the newspapers portrayed him as a criminal who “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and “disgraced” his country and army.
The newspapers maintained that their reporting, including allegations that Roberts-Smith was complicit in the murder, was accurate.
The most notable allegation proven in court was that Roberts-Smith, who traveled to the southern Afghan village of Darwan in 2012, walked a handcuffed man named Ali Jan to the edge of a 10-metre-high cliff that fell into the dry riverbed below.
Roberts-Smith then kicked Ali Jan in the chest, causing Ali Jan to fall backwards off the cliff, his face striking the cliff as he fell, before Ali Jan landed on the ground below, the court finding the civil standard on the balance of probabilities.
Ali Jan survived the fall, although he was seriously injured, and as he tried to stand up, he was reached by Australian soldiers walking down a diagonal foothold across the cliff.
The court found that Roberts-Smith ordered a soldier under his command, known before the court as Person 11, to shoot Ali Jan dead, and that the order was carried out. Ali Jan’s body was then dragged to a nearby field.
The other major allegation involved a raid on a bombed compound codenamed Whiskey 108 in 2009.
Two men were found hiding in the tunnel: one an older man and the other a younger man with a prosthetic leg. The men emerged from the tunnel unarmed and surrendered.
Judge Anthony Besanko found that Roberts-Smith ordered a petty officer on patrol to execute the old man, then manhandled the disabled man outside the walls of the compound, where he threw him to the ground and fired a para minimi machine gun into his prone body, killing him.
The disabled man’s leg was later kept as a souvenir by another soldier and used by Australian SAS troops as the vehicle for a gruesome celebratory drink at a pub called the Fat Lady’ Arms.
Former Australian SAS soldier Oliver Schulz has been charged with the war crime murder of an Afghan man in early 2023.
