Australia’s most decorated soldier was “complicit and responsible for the murder” of three Afghans while he was serving in Afghanistan, a judge said today as he announced his decision against the former SAS member on Thursday.

THE Ben Roberts-Smith he had been awarded the Victoria Cross for “remarkable bravery” in Afghanistan, where his unit was tasked with tracking down a high-ranking Taliban commander.

Roberts-Smith, 44, who served six tours in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2012, was considered national hero in Australiawith his portrait placed on the Australian War Memorial.

In fact, in 2011 he had also met Queen Elizabeth.

In 2020 an investigation found credible evidence that members of the Australian Army’s elite SAS killed dozens of unarmed prisoners in the war in Afghanistan.

The charges against him

On Thursday, he lost a libel suit he had brought against three newspapers that had accused him of involvement in the killing of six unarmed Afghan prisoners and of war crimes in Afghanistan.

No charges have been brought against the former soldier and he has not commented after the trial.

Judge Anthony Besanko today released his reasoning for his decision, in which he found that Roberts-Smith was not “an honest and reliable witness (…) on a number of occasions” and had abusive behavior towards other Australian soldiers.

“I concluded that the plaintiff (Roberts-Smith) was an accomplice and responsible for the murder of EKIA56 (…) in 2009 and for the murder of Ali Jan in Darwan on 11 September 2012 and for the murder of an Afghan man in Chinartu on 12 October 2012,” Besanko explains in his 736-page decision.

Australian newspapers The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times had alleged that Roberts-Smith had asked a junior soldier to shoot and kill an “elderly Afghan man”, referred to in court documents as EKIA56.

The judge noted that: “I concluded that in Tsinartou (…) the plaintiff, through an interpreter, asked (an unnamed person) to shoot an Afghan in custody.”

A soldier who was there “shot and killed the Afghan man in circumstances amounting to murder. The plaintiff was an accomplice and responsible for the murder,” Besanko emphasized.

At the same time, the federal judge concluded that Roberts-Smith had threatened another Australian soldier, to whom he had told: “if your performance does not improve on our next patrol, you will eat a bullet in the back of the head”.

Besides, Besanko estimated that Roberts-Smith was not a reliable witness and that he withheld evidence from the court as he knew it would harm him.

Only one soldier has been charged.