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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Ben Doherty

Senior SAS officer tells defamation trial he ‘couldn’t speculate’ if Ben Roberts-Smith complicit in alleged Afghan murders

Ben Roberts-Smith Smith SAS Arthur Moses SC Whiskey 108 Nicholas Owens SC
Ben Roberts-Smith at the the federal court in Sydney
Ben Roberts-Smith at the the federal court in Sydney, where his defamation trial has heard from Person 81, the final of 40 witnesses. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

A senior SAS officer – Ben Roberts-Smith’s troop commander during a critical SAS mission in 2009 – has failed to back his version of events of how two men came to die at an Afghan compound codenamed Whiskey 108, telling the defamation trial he “couldn’t speculate” on the allegation that Roberts-Smith murdered one man and ordered the execution of another.

Roberts-Smith says the two men – one an elderly man, the other a disabled man with a prosthetic leg – were legitimate insurgent targets, lawfully killed. The three newspapers he is suing say as part of their defence that the unarmed men surrendered after being discovered in a tunnel inside the compound but were then murdered.

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