Breaking: A Federal Court judge has found decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith murdered unarmed prisoners while deployed in Afghanistan, in a historic victory for the three media outlets at the centre of his multimillion-dollar defamation suit.
It is among the largest and most expensive defamation trials ever conducted in Australia and the first to examine in detail allegations of war crimes against members of the Special Air Service.
But in a judgment delivered on Thursday, Besanko ruled that the newspapers had successfully proven the truth of the vast bulk of those imputations. In the court case, the media outlets alleged that Roberts-Smith was involved in the murder of five Afghan prisoners, contrary to the rules of engagement that bound the SAS. The unlawful executions took place over five days in 2009 and 2012, the newspapers alleged, and they called 20 serving and former SAS soldiers to give evidence.He said five of the killings had happened lawfully in battle, while a sixth killing did not happen. He, in turn, called 12 current and former SAS witnesses.
In a second key allegation, the newspapers said Roberts-Smith was involved in two murders during an earlier mission on Easter Sunday, 2009, after two Afghan men were discovered in a tunnel in a compound dubbed Whiskey 108. They alleged Roberts-Smith killed one of the men himself and directed a “rookie” soldier, Person 4, to kill the second man as a form of “blooding” or initiation.
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