SYDNEY (AP) – Australia’s most decorated living war veteran unlawfully killed prisoners and committed other war crimes in Afghanistan, a judge ruled yesterday in dismissing the claims by Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith that he was defamed by media.
Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko ruled that the articles published in 2018 were substantially true about a number of war crimes committed by Roberts-Smith, a former Special Air Service Regiment corporal who now is a media company executive.
Besanko found Roberts-Smith, who was also awarded the Medal of Gallantry for his Afghanistan War service, “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and disgraced Australia through his conduct. The ruling is regarded as a significant win for press freedom against Australia’s extraordinarily restrictive defamation laws following a hard-fought trial over 110 court hearing days that is estimated to have cost more than AUD25 million in legal fees.
Proven allegations included that Roberts-Smith, the son of a judge, used a machine gun to shoot a prisoner with a prosthetic leg in the back at a Taleban compound in Uruzgan province in 2009. He kept the man’s prosthetic as a novelty drinking vessel.
The man was one of two unarmed Afghans that Roberts-Smith’s patrol had dragged from a tunnel.
Roberts-Smith pressured a “newly deployed and inexperienced” soldier to kill the second, older man to “blood the rookie”. The proven accusations also included that Roberts-Smith killed an unarmed, handcuffed farmer named Ali Jan by kicking him from a cliff top and into a riverbed at the Afghan village of Darwan in 2012. Roberts-Smith then directed a soldier under his command to shoot Jan dead.
Also found to be true were accusations that Roberts-Smith, who stands 2.02 metres tall, bullied soldiers and assaulted Afghan civilians.
Two of six unlawful killings Roberts-Smith was accused of involvement in were not proven to the civil court standard of balance of probability, the judge found.
Reports of domestic violence allegedly committed by Roberts-Smith were also found to be unproven and defamatory.
