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 SAS.
But in a judgment delivered on Thursday, Besanko ruled that the newspapers had successfully proven the truth of the bulk of those claims. Roberts-Smith maintained there was “no cliff” and “no kick”. The man in question was not a farmer but a suspected Taliban “spotter” reporting on the movement of coalition forces, he said, and both he and a soldier dubbed Person 11 lawfully fired shots at the man in a cornfield.
Roberts-Smith told the court there were no men in the tunnel. He said two insurgents, not prisoners, were killed lawfully outside Whiskey 108, including one by him.
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