Ben Roberts-Smith arrested over alleged war crimes
Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested in relation to a war crimes investigation and is expected to be charged with five counts of murder.
Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested after an investigation into alleged war crimes and is expected to be charged with multiple counts of murder.
Australia’s most decorated soldier was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday following allegations he murdered unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed there between 2009 and 2012.
A statement from the AFP confirmed a 47-year-old former ADF member was expected to be charged with five counts of war crimes involving murder.
The allegations include that he intentionally caused the death of two people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.
Roberts-Smith is accused of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring another person to commit a murder on three separate occasions.
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He is expected to appear in a NSW court later on Tuesday.
The maximum penalty for war crime murder is life in prison.
The OSI probes potential criminal matters raised in the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force’s Afghanistan inquiry report.
A Federal Court judge has previously found Roberts-Smith was responsible for a number of killings in a blockbuster defamation trial.
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Justice Anthony Besanko’s findings were on the balance of probabilities, rather than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.
The articles, published in 2018, included claims Mr Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed man off a cliff and ordered his execution, and machine-gunned another prisoner, taking his prosthetic leg home as a souvenir drinking vessel.
The alleged war criminal has maintained his innocence.
Justice Besanko found Roberts-Smith machine-gunned an unarmed prisoner in the back, taking the man’s prosthetic leg back to Australia to use as a beer drinking vessel during a 2009 raid on a compound codenamed Whiskey 108.
Mr Roberts-Smith also stood silent while a rookie soldier was ordered to execute an elderly Afghan prisoner so he could be “blooded”.
Justice Besanko found one of the newspapers’ central claims – that Mr Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed man, Ali Jan, off a 10-metre cliff and then ensured he was shot – was true.
-with AAP
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