PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   Australian law enforcement officials have arrested and charged Australia’s most highly decorated living soldier, 47-year-old Ben Roberts-Smith, with five counts of alleged war crime murders committed during the conflict in Afghanistan.

Roberts-Smith, a retired member of the Australian Defence Force, was taken into custody at Sydney Airport on Tuesday. The arrest drew criticism from a former Australian prime minister, who argued it is unfair to judge the choices of soldiers in life-or-death combat using the standards of everyday civilian life. Elon Musk, owner of X, also commented on the arrest, describing it as “insane.”

The Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator confirmed Roberts-Smith faces charges linked to the killings of five unarmed Afghans during three separate incidents between 2009 and 2012. AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett alleged that Roberts-Smith either personally killed the unarmed Afghans or ordered a subordinate to carry out the deaths. If convicted, Roberts-Smith could face a life sentence for each charge.

“It will be claimed that the victims were not engaging in hostilities at the time they were allegedly murdered in Afghanistan,” Barrett noted during a press conference. “It will also be alleged that the victims were detained, unarmed, and under the control of Australian Defence Force personnel when they were killed.”

Ross Barnett, director of investigations at the Office of the Special Investigator, stated that the probe into Roberts-Smith launched in 2021. Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross after assaulting two enemy machine gun positions during his fifth deployment to Afghanistan.

Barnett told the press conference that the investigation faced “challenging circumstances,” as some of the killings took place more than a decade prior, and investigators were unable to travel to Afghanistan.

“We do not have access to the crime scenes, nor do we have photographs, site plans, measurements, projectile recovery data, or blood spatter analysis — all of the standard evidence we would typically collect at a domestic crime scene,” Barnett said during the press briefing.

While Australia’s sitting prime minister has not yet commented on the arrest, former Liberal Party leader and ex-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott voiced his support for Roberts-Smith in a lengthy post on X.

“If Ben Roberts-Smith transgressed, why wasn’t this uncovered before he received his gallantry awards, and why didn’t his senior officers detect and swiftly address a culture of brutality toward prisoners, instead of letting it fester as has been alleged for over a decade?” Abbott wrote.

Claims that Roberts-Smith engaged in war crimes first entered public discourse in 2017 and 2018, in articles published by The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times.

Roberts-Smith filed a defamation lawsuit against the three publications, a case that became Australia’s most expensive defamation trial, but in 2023, a Federal Court judge ruled that four of the six murder allegations brought against Roberts-Smith by the newspapers were valid.

In one of the allegations deemed to have merit by Justice Anthony Besanko, Roberts-Smith is alleged to have marched a handcuffed Afghan man named Ali Jan to the edge of a 10-meter cliff and pushed him off. The man survived the fall, but Roberts-Smith and his fellow soldiers walked down a path to reach him, before Roberts-Smith ordered a subordinate — identified only as Person 11 during court proceedings — to shoot the man.

Australia’s High Court rejected Roberts-Smith’s appeal of the ruling in September 2025.

The criminal charges against Roberts-Smith stem from a joint investigation by the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP. The two Australian agencies have launched 53 investigations into ADF personnel linked to war crime allegations in Afghanistan, with 10 of those probes still ongoing.