Yahoo Finance ‘Nightmare’: Ben Roberts-Smith says reports he murdered unarmed civilian are ‘outright malicious’
Accused soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has denied outright the most dramatic murder alleged against him – that he kicked an unarmed, handcuffed Afghan civilian off a cliff before ordering him shot – telling a court the accusation was false and “outright malicious”.
“It feels like you’re in a bloody nightmare,” he told the court during an excoriating day of evidence. “Every time they write it I wonder: ‘how am I in this position?’”
The alleged murder of an Afghan farmer named Ali Jan, in the village of Darwan on 11 September 2012, has become a centrepiece of a suite of allegations of wrongdoing levelled against Roberts-Smith in articles published by three Australian newspapers in 2018.
In the newspapers’ defence documents before court, it is alleged that Ali Jan had been handcuffed during an SAS raid on Darwan. As helicopters were coming to “extract” the Australian soldiers, Roberts-Smith allegedly took Ali Jan to the edge of a small cliff and forced him into a kneeling position.
Roberts-Smith is then alleged to have “kicked him hard in the midriff causing him to fall back over the cliff and land in the dry creek bed below. The impact of the fall to the dry creek below was so significant that it knocked Ali Jan’s teeth out of his mouth.”
“[Roberts-Smith] directed a soldier under his command to kill Ali Jan, which he did.”
The court is expected to hear later from other soldiers who were in Darwan that day, as well as from Afghan villagers present and from relatives of Ali Jan.
Roberts-Smith told the court the killing never happened, and he had never killed an unarmed prisoner.
He said at the end of the raid on Darwan on that day, he was following another soldier – anonymised in court documents as Person 11 – walking along a dry creek bed towards the helicopter extraction point.
Person 11 climbed an embankment and immediately ‘engaged’ – opened fired upon – an alleged “spotter”, a man hiding in a cornfield.
Roberts-Smith said he climbed the embankment to support Person 11 and fired “three to five rounds” at the man, who was “either going down or was down”.
The man was killed and, Roberts-Smith said, was found to be in possession of a radio.
Roberts-Smith rejected a question the radio was planted on the man’s body as a ‘throw-down’, a piece of compromising equipment carried by soldiers and placed on the bodies of victims as a post-facto justification for their killing.
He said the man was a “spotter” – a forward scout who reports soldiers’ movements back to militants – and therefore a legitimate target, killed within the rules of engagement.
“He was behaving in a manner that was consistent with enemy spotter activity ... it’s not normal ‘pattern of life’ to sit in the cornfields,” he told the court.
Patrols he had been involved in had been attacked “four or five times” as they were being extracted by helicopter, Roberts-Smith said.
Asked by his barrister, Bruce McClintock, whether any element of the allegation of killing an unarmed ‘PUC’ – ‘person under control’ – was true, Roberts-Smith was categoric.
“There was no kick ... there was no PUC.
“I cannot believe a fanciful story like that could, let alone be believed, and be printed in the paper and be maintained for a number of years … none of it adds up, none of it makes sense.”
Roberts-Smith also denied a further allegation of murder, that he killed an unarmed boy, aged between 15 and 18 years old, who was riding with three men in a Toyota Hilux stopped by an Australian SAS patrol “on or about 21 October 2012”.
The newspapers’ defence documents allege the adolescent was “searched and detained by Person 16 (an SAS soldier) and then handed over to [Roberts-Smith’s] patrol for questioning, together with the other occupants of the Hilux”.
“At the time the Afghan adolescent was visibly extremely nervous,” the documents allege.
The newspapers then alleged: “One or two days after the mission, Person 16 said to [Roberts-Smith], in substance, ‘What happened to the young bloke who was shaking like a leaf?’.
“[Roberts-Smith] responded, in substance, ‘I shot that cunt in the head. Person 15 (another soldier) told me not to kill any cunts on that job so I pulled out my 9mm and shot him in the head. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Roberts-Smith told the court on Friday he never said those words, and that the event could not have happened, because he never fired his pistol in combat while on deployment in Afghanistan.
“I never had to engage with my pistol,” he told the court.
Since the allegation was made in court documents, it has emerged Roberts-Smith was in a different part of Afghanistan on 21 October 2012. Australian War Memorial documents show that on that date, Roberts-Smith was leading a reconnaissance patrol in Char-Chineh, an action for which he would receive a commendation for distinguished service.
The “on or about” date has since been amended in the newspapers’ defence to 5 November of the same year.
Roberts-Smith said the publication – and repetition – of the allegation was acutely hurtful.
“I felt they were being outright malicious because they knew I wasn’t there but they still wanted to say it.”
Earlier on Friday, Roberts-Smith told the court his Victoria Cross became a cross to bear, saying it “put a target on my back” for other soldiers jealous of his medal.
The decorated former corporal detailed at length his missions in Afghanistan, and the tensions within the SAS as soldiers were sent back for repeated deployments in a long, grinding and costly war.
Roberts-Smith is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times for defamation over a series of reports published in 2018 that he alleges are defamatory because they portray him as someone who “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and committed war crimes including murder.
The 42-year-old has consistently denied the allegations, saying they are “false”, “baseless” and “completely without any foundation in truth”. The newspapers are defending their reporting as true.
